/ 


c 


MEN   WOMEN    AND    WAR 


MEN    WOMEN 
AND  WAR 


BY 

WILL   IRWIN 


NEW  YORK 
D.    APPLETON   AND    COMPANY 

MCMXV 


2136464 


Printtd  in  Qrtat  Britain 


PREFACE 

THIS  is  a  fabric  of  stitched  things.  But 
I  suspect  that  all  of  us  who  have  been 
trying,  by  the  poor  mosaic  of  human 
words,  to  convey  Armageddon,  have  shown 
the  same  fault,  scattering  imperfect  treat- 
ment. The  thing  is  vast  beyond  all  human 
conception  ;  and  it  is  covered  by  mists 
of  secrecy.  We  see  merely  a  glimpse 
here  and  there,  and  with  each  glimpse 
comes  such  a  rush  of  emotions  and  im- 
pressions that  we  fail  through  sheer  despair 
of  recording  them  all. 

I  have  recorded  myself  in  these  scatter- 
ing essays  as  an  adversary  of  war ;  but 
I  beg  the  reader  to  let  nothing  which  I 
have  said  carry  the  implication  that  I 
would  turn  the  hands  of  the  more  civilised 
European  nations  back  from  their  task. 
Democracy,  attacked  without  and  within, 


vi  PREFACE 

is  on  test.  If  the  more  civilised  European 
nations  fail,  the  end  will  be  a  worse  thing 
than  war.  Those  same  civilised  European 
nations,  together  with  a  submerged  and 
silenced  party  in  the  less  civilised  nations, 
hope  that  this  will  be  the  end  of  warfare. 
Democracy  is  on  test ;  so,  I  feel,  is  real 
Christianity.  In  the  teachings  of  Christ 
lie  the  seeds  of  Democracy.  "  Men  are  not 
equal ;  some  are  strong  and  some  are 
weak ;  some  are  good  and  some  are 
wicked  ;  but  let  us  act  on  the  theory  that 
they  are  equal.  Because  I  am  strong, 
I  will  not  oppress  my  brother  who  is  weak, 
and  because  I  am  good  I  will  not  despise 
my  brother  who  is  evil."  That  canon  of 
the  new  law  became,  in  time,  Democracy. 
The  more  civilised  nations  of  Europe, 
joined  with  that  nation  which  has  such 
splendid  possibilities  of  civilisation,  are 
righting  this  war  against  old,  barbaric 
and  Pagan  conceptions  of  kingship.  It 
is  not  political  warfare  ;  it  is  a  Holy  War. 

London:  March,  1915. 


CONTENTS 


i 

PAGE 

DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS 1 

II 
THE  WRECKAGE  OP  WAR 43 

III 
THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR 74 

IV 

THE  SOUL  OP  FRANCE 98 

V 
THE  BRITISH  CALM 132 

VI 

THE  SPLENDID  STORY  OP  YPRES  164 


vii 


MEN,    WOMEN     AND    WAR 

I 

DETAINED    BY    THE    GERMANS 
September,  1914 

ON  the  nineteenth  of  that  swiftly  moving 
August  of  this  terrible  year,  Brussels 
awaited  with  tempered  apprehension  the 
appearance  of  her  conquerors.  I  am  here 
obliged  to  recapitulate  a  history  grown 
already  stale  when  these  lines  go  to  press. 
Belgium  had  held  back  at  Liege  the  German 
advance ;  but  the  heavy  German  siege 
guns  had  already  come  into  position,  and 
one  read  between  the  lines  of  the  carefully 
censored  reports  that  the  resistance  at 
Liege  was  over.  There  had  been  outpost 
fighting  at  Tirlemont,  only  an  hour  or 
two  by  motor  car  from  Brussels.  The 
populace  of  the  Flemish  metropolis  lived 
in  a  mood  of  mingled  grief,  triumph,  and 

B 


2         MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

fear.  New  mourning  was  everywhere ; 
in  that  heroic  defence  of  Liege  the  flower  of 
Brussels  had  fallen.  Two  troops  of  cavalry 
recruited  from  the  noble  or  aristocratic 
families  of  the  capital  had  charged  a 
German  masked  battery  in  the  first  brush  ; 
only  eighty  came  back.  One  countess  of 
the  realm  had  lost  two  sons  and  the  third 
lay  wounded  in  the  Royal  ballroom,  now 
become  a  hospital. 

Such  of  the  populace  as  had  no  private 
cause  for  mourning  were  in  the  mood, 
I  think,  of  a  small  boy  who  has  blacked 
the  eye  of  the  village  champion  and  awaits, 
triumphant  but  apprehensive,  his  second 
rush.  'The  wiser  heads  of  Brussels  knew 
that  their  city  now  lay  at  the  mercy  of 
the  Germans.  They  did  not  expect,  how- 
ever, a  general  advance  through  the  city, 
much  less  a  permanent  military  occupation ; 
the  worst  they  feared  was  a  cavalry  raid 
"for  moral  effect."  But  that  advance, 
be  it  raid  or  occupation,  was  upon  them  ; 
they  knew  that.  The  Government,  the 
Queen,  and  most  of  the  foreign  ministers, 
had  moved  to  the  fortified  city  of  Antwerp  ; 
almost  alone  among  the  Diplomatic  Corps 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS    8 

the  American  minister,  Brand  Whitlock, 
stood  his  ground,  hoping,  since  he  repre- 
sented the  strongest  neutral  Power,  to 
do  something  for  the  people  of  Belgium 
as  he  had  already  done  much  for  the 
Germans  stranded  in  the  land  of  their 
enemies. 

Externally,  that  once-gay  city — so  lacy 
in  its  architecture,  so  green  and  bright  in  its 
parkways— moved  about  sober  and  muted. 
From  its  public  buildings  fluttered  the  Red 
Cross  flag ;  through  its  wide-sweeping 
avenues  passed  and  repassed  the  Garde 
Civique — futile  little  citizen  soldiers,  armed 
mostly  with  old-fashioned  single-shot  mus- 
kets, crowned  with  bizarre  felt  hats  which 
looked  like  old-fashioned  bowlers  furnished 
forth  with  red  braid  and  red  cockades. 
They  were  on  their  way  to  positions  in 
the  outposts  of  the  city.  Though  the 
out-of-doors  cafes  were  still  running,  most 
of  the  tables  were  empty  ;  the  few  sippers 
of  hock  and  liqueurs  spoke  almost  in 
whispers.  And  everywhere  you  looked, 
you  saw  how  the  clock  had  stopped  on 
August  2 — the  day  when  Belgium  began 
her  heroic  fight.  The  theatrical  and 

B  2 


4        MEN,    WOMEN   AND   WAR 

cinema  posters,  falling  ragged  and  shabby 
from  the  boards,  proclaimed  the  bill  for 
"  week  of  August  2  " — and  stopped.  By 
the  elevator  of  our  hotel  hung  a  framed 
"  carte  de  jour  "  giving  the  table  d'hote 
menu  and  music  programme  for  the  day. 

No  one  had  thought  to  take  it  down  ; 
and  it  also  bore  the  date  "  August  2  " 
the  day,  perhaps,  when  Belgium  ceased  to 
exist  as  a  nation. 

Into  this  situation  came  four  American 
correspondents,  all  save  one  novices  at 
war.  For  the  two  weeks  during  which 
Belgium  held  the  frontier  the  English 
correspondents,  furnished  with  passes  from 
a  complaisant  Belgian  Government,  had 
been  dodging  back  and  forth  in  automobiles 
behind  the  firing  line,  getting  glimpses 
here  and  there  of  the  fighting.  They 
wired  back  full  accounts  and  let  their 
home  editors  take  chances  with  the  strict 
English  censorship.  And  they  overdid  the 
process,  "  I  notice,"  said  a  great 
American  editor,  "  that  if  it  gets  written 
often  enough,  it  gets  printed."  An  indis- 
creet British  reporter  sent  to  London  the 
exact  location  of  the  Belgian  General 


Staff,  heart  of  the  army.  A  careless  censor 
let  it  through  to  publication.  The  English 
Government  recalled  all  its  correspondents, 
the  Belgian  Government  all  its  passes. 

There  we  were  without  passes  or  standing 
of  any  kind  ;  we  had  merely  our  passports, 
our  credentials,  and  letters  from  the 
American  consul  certifying  that  we  were 
personally  known  to  him  as  what  we 
represented  ourselves  to  be.  And  we  had 
come  too  late  for  any  action  !  We  started 
for  Belgian  military  headquarters,  to  see 
what  could  be  done,  in  a  state  of  deter- 
mined hopelessness.  We  found  the  De- 
partment of  Passports  sitting  about  a 
table  in  an  antique  courtyard,  like  a 
picture  of  the  French  Revolution.  We 
were  surprised  at  their  cordiality.  Yes,  it 
was  true  that  there  were  no  more  news- 
paper passes.  But  our  consular  papers 
were  sufficient.  With  them  one  could 
go  anywhere.  They  wished  the  American 
gentlemen  well.  In  the  light  of  later 
events,  I  can  see  the  deep  Flemish  sarcasm 
in  the  remarks  of  those  little  military 
men.  If  four  mad  Americans  wished  to 
put  their  heads  into  the  Prussian  noose, 


6        MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

let  them  !  At  the  time,  however,  we  failed 
to  perceive  that.  Our  sole  emotion  was 
joy.  We  were  going  to  see  something  ! 

So  we  started — Cobb,  Dosch,  McCutch- 
eon,  and  I — in  a  Brussels  city  taxicab 
whose  driver  was  willing  to  take  a  chance 
for  an  extra  tip.  We  had  just  arrived  ; 
we  knew  nothing  of  Belgian  geography  ; 
only  one  of  us  had  any  knowledge  whatever 
of  French.  We  did  not  even  know  where 
we  were  going.  On  the  way  out,  however, 
we  stopped  at  the  house  of  a  well-informed 
American,  who  gave  our  chauffeur  a  kind 
of  itinerary.  "  Let  him  follow  that !  " 
said  he,  "  and  keep  on  until  he's  stopped  !  v 
I  remember  now  that  I  caught  the  word 
"  Louvain."  Louvain,  the  name  that  is 
written  on  the  heart  of  the  world,  meant 
nothing  to  us  then. 

At  the  entrance  of  the  parkway  which 
leads  from  Brussels  to  the  Bois,  we  caught 
our  first  glimpse  of  war.  A  barricade  of 
street  cars  blocked  the  way,  before  it 
lay  a  new  trench,  the  turf  carefully  cut 
away  in  blocks  and  stacked  for  future 
use.  Two  little  cannon  poked  their  stupid 
noses  from  an  embrasure  beyond.  Still 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS    7 

further  along  lay  a  block  of  barbed- wire 
entanglements,  strung  on  newly  planted 
posts.  A  sentry  stopped  us,  nodded  his 
head,  let  us  go  on.  As  he  gave  the  word, 
he  cast  upon  us  one  curious  look,  then  he 
fell  back  and  leaned  against  a  tree.  All 
the  lines  of  his  face  drooped  ;  and  the  other 
units  of  the  Garde  Civique,  resting  by  the 
roadside,  had  that  same  expression  of 
overburdening  anxiety.  Their  ill-fitting 
little  red-and-blue  uniforms,  topped  with 
those  beautified  bowler  hats,  their  old- 
fashioned  muskets,  and  that  expression, 
marked  them  for  what  they  were — citizen 
soldiers,  half-trained,  waiting  to  fight  a 
hopeless  battle  of  honour.  Now  we  were 
in  the  great,  broad  parkway  which  leads 
to  the  Bois.  That  superb  bit  of  landscape- 
gardening  stretched  away  deserted  ;  there 
was  neither  pedestrian  nor  vehicle  in  sight. 
On  all  sides  advertising  devices,  trolley 
tracks,  entrances  to  golf  links,  dancing 
pavilions  with  refreshment  booths,  proved 
how  freely  the  people  used  this  park  in  a 
normal  August.  This  vacancy,  this  silence 
among  all  the  familiar  signs  of  human 
habitation,  resembled  a  scene  from  one 


8        MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

of  those  horrible  nightmare  stories  wherein 
some  noxious  vapour  of  a  comet  strikes 
our  world  and  leaves  no  man,  but  only 
the  works  of  man.  Tervueren  lies  a  few 
miles  out  from  Brussels.  It  is  a  fashion- 
able suburb  with  deep  woods,  pretty  villas 
and  elaborate  summer  palaces.  Here  was 
a  little  life ;  a  few  bare-kneed,  well-behaved 
Belgian  children  played  about  the  side- 
walks— the  last  playing  children  we  were 
to  see  for  many  a  day.  There  were  more 
details  of  the  Garde  Civique,  more  street-car 
barricades,  trenches,  and  entanglements. 
Again  a  dispirited  sentry  stopped  us  and 
gave  us  a  glance  of  curiosity  as  we  went  on. 
Again  we  marked  the  listless  attitude,  the 
drawn,  anxious  faces  of  these  little  citizen 
soldiers. 

We  were  in  the  open  country  now ; 
though,  indeed,  the  perfectly  crowned 
European  road  ran  between  unpaved  foot- 
paths, as  in  a  city  park.  Suddenly  the 
roads  had  become  inhabited  ;  and  all  the 
pedestrians  were  walking  in  our  direction — 
a  steady  flow  toward  Brussels.  Everyone 
carried  something — a  suit  case,  an  old- 
fashioned  country  bag,  a  round  bundle  tied 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS    9 

up  in  bedding.  This  advance  guard  was 
mainly  men  or  young  women,  and  they 
walked  briskly ;  some  of  them  were  even 
talking  or  laughing.  The  line  came  on  and 
on,  and  presently  we  were  in  the  zone  of  old 
women,  of  children,  of  whole  families,  of 
the  more  heavily  burdened.  Two  old 
ladies  tottered  weakly  along,  carrying 
bundles  across  their  backs.  They  wore 
those  ridiculous  little  purple-flowered  bon- 
nets of  the  1880  period  which  the  Belgian 
countrywoman  keeps  for  her  best ; 
beside  them  a  young  boy  struggled  with  a 
child's  wagon,  full  to  overflowing.  A  whole 
family  passed.  The  children,  grouped 
round  an  overburdened  mother,  each 
carrying  a  bundle.  The  father  trundled 
a  wheelbarrow,  shaded  by  an  umbrella, 
and  containing,  among  much  bedding,  a 
pair  of  baby  twins,  sound  asleep.  A  fringe 
of  rolled  umbrellas  surrounded  the  edges 
of  the  load.  Everyone,  in  fact,  carried 
at  least  one  umbrella — provision  against 
sleeping  in  the  fields  during  one  of  the 
summer  rains  of  Brabant. 

No  one  spoke,  but  no  one  wept  either. 
The  world  was  struck  silent,  dumb.    The 


10      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

only  sound  was  the  shuffling  of  their  feet 
along  the  dry  pathway.  Dosch,  who  had 
seen  the  San  Francisco  disaster,  remarked 
on  that :  "It  was  just  that  way  in  San 
Francisco,"  he  said. 

Here  and  there  a  family,  more  opulent 
or  more  lucky  than  the  rest,  had  horse 
transport.  Mainly  the  vehicles  were  farm 
wagons,  drawn  by  a  single,  great-necked 
Flemish  horse  which  plodded  sullenly  with 
its  overload  of  household  treasures,  of 
bedding,  of  cooking  utensils,  and  of  people. 
An  aristocratic  landau  trotted  more  briskly 
through  the  crowd.  A  peasant  girl  drove 
it ;  in  its  double  seats  were  three  women 
in  fashionable  clothes  and  two  priests. 
The  women,  looking  ever  and  again  back 
on  the  road,  were  crying  softly  into  their 
handkerchiefs — the  only  tears  I  saw.  And 
once  again  there  was  a  fashionable  English 
tan-coloured  trap,  commandeered  from  I 
know  not  where — for  a  farm  horse  drew 
it.  Among  these  larger  vehicles  threaded 
the  dogcarts  of  Flanders,  the  owner  pushing 
from  behind,  the  dog-auxiliary  plodding 
soberly  between  the  front  wheels.  And 
among  these  people,  as  among  the  increas- 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  11 

ing  crowd  of  pedestrians  on  the  footpath, 
silence. 

There  were  guards  at  every  crossroads  ; 
either  men  of  the  Garde  Civique  or  citizen 
soldiers  arrayed  in  those  blue  tunics  and 
round  caps  which  the  Red  Cross  women  of 
Brussels  had  been  stitching  night  and  day. 
Sometimes  they  stopped  us  ;  always  they 
let  us  go  on  after  one  curious,  searching 
glance.  A  soldier  coming  up  on  a  bicycle 
—he  wore  the  uniform  of  the  regulars — 
hailed  us  from  behind.  He  merely  wanted 
a  lift,  for  he  was  carrying  half  a  dozen 
bottles  of  beer.  We  took  him  aboard  with 
his  wheel  and  his  load.  He  was  a  tired 
little  man,  very  drawn  of  face  and  sober 
of  mien,  though  he  tried  to  be  gay.  As 
for  the  Germans — he  knew  nothing,  except 
that  they  were  coming. 

We  topped  a  rise — and  there  lay  the 
Belgian  army.  It  filled  the  slope  before 
us  and  the  hollow  beneath.  In  the  fore- 
ground a  group  of  cavalrymen  stood  about 
their  picketed  horses  while  a  cook  in  his 
undershirt  dealt  out  coffee  from  a  milk 
can.  Further  along,  an  infantry  regiment 
lay  stretched  out,  resting,  in  a  field  of 


12      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

lucerne.  Still  further  along  were  more 
regiments ;  in  the  background,  in  the 
hollow  of  the  hills,  battery  after  battery 
of  artillery  threaded  through  the  roads, 
taking  position. 

Never  have  I  seen  men  so  dirty,  so 
utterly  bedraggled  and  weary,  as  these 
who  gathered  for  that  pitiful  little  Appo- 
mattox  of  Brussels.  The  last  ounce  of 
strength  seemed  to  be  gone  from  them. 
The  sentry  who  stopped  us  and  inspected 
our  pass  drooped  on  his  gun.  His  coat 
was  matted  with  grease  and  dirt ;  trans- 
versely, just  above  the  knee  of  his  baggy 
trousers,  was  the  unmistakable  double  rent 
of  a  bullet.  Many  had  been  slightly 
wounded ;  one  wore  a  bandage  like  a 
football  head  harness  ;  one  had  a  splash 
of  absorbent  cotton  and  a  strip  of  adhesive 
plaster  across  the  place  where  the  bridge 
of  his  nose  had  been.  In  groups  by  the 
roadside  the  lately  and  slightly  wounded 
in  the  last  engagement  awaited  transporta- 
tion to  the  rear.  They  were  hugging 
bandaged  arms  and  legs ;  their  faces 
showed  the  torpor  which  is  the  second 
stage  of  violent  suffering. 


We  were  all  a  little  exaltt  we  four,  by 
this  first  touch  of  war,  even  by  the  horror 
of  it,  else  we  should  not  have  gone  on,  I 
suppose,  past  what  proved  afterward  to 
be  the  main  force  set  to  hold  Brussels 
against  the  invader.  But  go  on  we  did, 
across  another  hill.  There,  in  a  hollow 
forward  and  to  our  right,  lay  what  looked 
like  another  village.  Behind  it  rose 
straight  columns  of  smoke.  I  stopped  a 
refugee  and  inquired  what  the  town  might 
be.  "  Louvain,"  he  said.  "  Is  it  burning?  ' 
I  asked  in  my  novice  French.  "  Oui !  " 
he  said.  And  then  he  asked  that  question 
which  we  were  to  hear  again  and  again 
in  the  course  of  that  day  :  "  Where  are 
the  English  and  the  French  ?  Have  they 
come  ?  "  "  No  !  "  I  was  forced  to  answer. 
He  turned  without  visible  emotion  and 
went  on. 

Then,  as  we  stood  there  by  the  road, 
some  one  said  :  "  Listen — is  that  firing  ?  ' 
From  the  clear  horizon  came  a  noise  like 
the  distant  thunder  when  a  storm  gathers. 
It  stopped ;  it  began  again  in  sudden 
bursts  ;  straining  our  ears,  we  caught  an 
undercurrent — a  steady,  rattling  buzz 


14      MEN,    WOMEN   AND   WAR 

which  we  knew  for  musketry.  We  had 
stood  for  some  time  listening  before  I 
perceived  that  the  field  of  purple  cabbages 
to  our  immediate  right  was  not  uninhabited. 
Here  and  there  peeped  out  blue  and  red 
kepis.  It  was  a  Belgian  picket  line,  con- 
cealed in  the  cabbage  rows  or  behind  the 
neat  little  mushroom-shaped  haystacks. 

Here  the  chauffeur  set  his  foot  down.- 
He  would  not  go  on.  With  my  imperfect 
knowledge  of  French,  I  made  out  that  he 
was  afraid  of  having  his  cab  appropriated. 
He  put  it  on  those  grounds  ;  as  I,  agreeing 
with  him,  put  it  on  the  grounds  that  we 
should  never  see  the  grand  entry  to 
Brussels  if  we  let  ourselves  be  cut  off. 
Both  of  us,  I  take  it,  had  deeper  and  more 
emotional  reasons,  I  know  that  I  had. 

Before  us  lay  a  rise  in  the  road  which 
seemed  to  command  a  better  view  of  the 
little  town.  There  were  still  a  few  refugees 
along  the  road — all,  however,  coming  our 
way.  If  they  could  walk  along  that  road, 
so  could  we,  said  the  bolder  spirits  of  the 
party.  At  this  moment  came  frantic  pro- 
tests in  Cockney  English  from  an  auto- 
mobile which  had  drawn  up  beside  ours. 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  15 

It  contained  two  British  moving-picture 
men  with  their  camera. 

"  Better  keep  out,  gov'ner,"  said  one 
of  them.  "  We're  getting  ready  to  hurry 
back.  There's  fighting  just  beyond.  We 
filmed  a  Belgian  troop  of  cavalry  going  into 
action,  an'  filmed  'em  twenty  minutes  later 
coming  back  with  half  the  saddles  empty." 

Yet  it  drew  us — that  rise — with  a  kind 
of  fascination.  And  at  last  we  cut  loose 
and  started,  telling  the  chauffeur  to  wait 
our  return. 

The  refugees  were  still  dragging  on, 
but  at  a  quickened  pace.  I  stopped  them 
now  and  then  to  ask  for  news.  None 
could  give  any ;  but  always  was  there 
the  same  pathetic  question :  "  Are  the 
French  and  English  here  ?  v  And  always, 
when  I  answered  "  No,"  the  questioner 
settled  into  his  expression  of  hopeless 
stolidity  before  he  plodded  on.  The  firing 
had  stopped  now ;  the  unnatural  silence 
settled  again  over  earth  and  air  and 
people.  Still  rose  the  column  of  smoke 
beyond.  We  thought  then  that  it  was 
a  village  of  Louvain  burning— forecast  of 
its  fate  a  week  later.  I  know  better  now  ; 


16      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

it  was  only  some  dry  brush   behind   the 
town,  set  on  fire  by  the  late  skirmish. 

We  topped  the  rise  and  saw  nothing 
but  more  refugees  ;  and  still  we  kept  on. 
Indeed,  the  refugees  came  even  more 
thickly,  plodded  even  more  silently.  A 
tall,  dirty,  weary  Belgian  soldier  walked 
in  the  middle  of  one  group.  Tired  as  he 
was,  he  was  carrying  a  bundle  for  a  woman. 
He  stopped  me.  "  Don't  go  on,  gentle- 
men," he  said.  14  It  is  very  dangerous." 
As  the  conservative  of  the  party,  I  wanted 
to  take  his  advice.  "  Aw,  he's  some  de- 
serter," said  the  rest.  A  few  steps  further 
on  a  Belgian  soldier  on  a  bicycle  rested 
his  foot  on  the  ground  while  he  talked 
with  a  choked,  excited  voice  and  a  drawn 
expression  to  a  group  of  women.  He 
was  the  only  person  whom  I  had  seen 
show  any  animation  for  an  hour. 

44  Where    is    the    fighting  ?  "     I    asked. 

44  Toward  Tirlemont,"  he  replied,  44  eight 
or  ten  kilometres.'1 

44  You    see — that    other    fellow    was    a 
deserter,"  said  the  rest.    So  we  pressed  on. 

Now   suddenly,    round   a   bend   of  the 
road,  appeared  a  tavern — 44  Le  Lion  Rouge 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  17 

de  Belgique  " — terminating  a  long  village 
street  which  curved  out  of  sight.  That 
was  Louvain,  said  a  passer-by  ;  and  he 
repeated  that  pathetic  question  about  the 
French  and  the  English. 

It  became  plain  that  my  French — the 
only  French  we  had  between  the  four  of 
us— wouldn't  do  for  complex  inquiries  about 
the  position  of  the  Belgian  lines.  Just 
then  a  priest  came  down  the  street,  walking 
calm-faced  and  easily  amid  that  silent, 
moveless  crowd.  I  ventured  to  ask  him 
if  he  spoke  English. 

"  No,  monsieur,"  he  replied,  "  but  in 
my  establishment  are  certain  brothers  who 
do."  We  walked  with  him  half  a  block. 
He  opened  a  great,  arched  wooden  door, 
and  lo  !  we  were  in  a  quiet  monastery 
garden — an  old  set  of  arched  cloisters 
surrounding  a  little  area  of  old-fashioned 
flowers  and  bearing  pear  trees.  He  smiled 
and  pointed  as  we  entered. 

"  Voila — le  tennis  Anglais  !  "  he  said. 
There,  in  one  corner,  lay  an  unkempt 
tennis  court ;  from  an  ash  can  protruded 
some  badly  battered  old  tennis  rackets, 
much  patched  with  cords  and  ropes. 

c 


18       MEN,    WOMEN   AND    WAR 

"  Some  of  our  students  are  English,"  he 
said  in  explanation.  "  But  it  is  vacation 
now."  He  rang  a  bell.  From  a  far  corner 
rose  a  group  of  black-costumed  brothers 
and  advanced  towards  us — serene,  kindly 
faces  all.  But  their  English,  it  turned 
out,  was  even  worse  than  my  French. 
They  could  give  us  no  explanations.  Most 
of  them,  I  take  it,  were  Spanish.  With 
all  the  grave  courtesy  of  his  race,  the  one 
who  spoke  the  best  English  asked  us  if 
we  would  have  some  wine.  Even  in  such 
times,  one  could  not  refuse  an  invitation 
like  that.  In  a  little  room,  furnished 
with  a  billiard  table,  which  opened  off 
the  refectory,  an  old,  bearded  brother 
in  a  leather  apron  brought  us  some  excellent 
old  Burgundy. 

Now  we  were  out  on  the  street  again. 
There  was  no  firing ;  and  we  had  space 
to  remember  that  we  were  very  hungry. 
Across  the  square  stood  a  little  inn ; 
on  the  square  itself  was  stacked  the  trans- 
port of  a  village  circus.  The  innkeeper 
could  give  us  no  information  about  Ger- 
mans ;  but  he  did  give  us  some  bread 
and  cheese  and  coffee.  As  we  ate  and 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  19 

drank,  we  congratulated  ourselves,  I 
remember,  on  being  there  in  spite  of 
Anglo-Belgian  conservatism  concerning 
passes. 

We  had  finished,  we  had  taken  out  our 
money  to  pay,  when  the  innkeeper  burst 
into  the  room  pouring  out  a  flood  of 
excited  French,  out  of  which  I  could  at 
first  make  nothing.  I  calmed  him  down 
— and  then  I  got  it. 

"  Messieurs — eight  German  soldiers  have 
been  seen  over  there  !  "  he  cried,  waving 
his  hand  across  the  square. 

"  Let's  find  the  centre  of  this  town," 
suggested  some  one — McCutcheon,  I  think. 
"  Perhaps  we  can  get  the  real  information 
there  I  "  I  inquired  for  the  Hotel  de  Ville 
of  the  place,  not  knowing  that  I  was 
naming  one  of  the  great  architectural 
treasures  of  Brabant.  "  Par  la,"  said  the 
inhabitants,  pointing  along  that  little  street 
by  which  we  had  first  entered  the  town. 
There  were  scarcely  any  more  refugees, 
only  the  silent  groups — men,  women,  and 
children — in  the  streets.  They  did  not 
even  glance  at  us,  though  our  Anglo-Saxon 
appearance  must  have  been  strange  enough 

c  2 


20      MEN,    WOMEN   AND    WAR 

±o  them.  A  limousine  automobile  came 
in  sight,  driving  madly  back  towards 
Brussels.  It  bore  a  Belgian  flag.  An 
arm  bound  with  the  brassard  of  the  Red 
Cross  emerged  from  the  door,  waving  us 
back.  The  chauffeur  checked  his  speed 
as  he  passed  ;  I  fancy  that  he  had  some 
idea  of  taking  us  aboard.  If  so,  he  thought 
better  of  it,  because  he  got  up  speed  and 
went  on.  And  we  walked  away,  looking 
for  the  centre  of  the  town  and  information. 

Our  street  curved  sharply.  We  were 
in  a  narrow  thoroughfare,  bordered  by  the 
overhanging  second  stories  of  the  Middle 
Ages. 

Suddenly  uniforms  flashed  into  sight, 
crossing  the  street.  They  were  eight  worn, 
hatless  Belgian  soldiers  on  a  dodging  run— 
their  shoulders  hunched,  their  guns  drag- 
ging behind  them.  They  disappeared  into 
a  doorway.  "  Looks  like  street  fighting  !  ': 
we  said.  "  Let's  hurry  on."  The  silent 
populace,  I  noticed,  were  all  looking  up 
the  street. 

And  then — twenty  yards  before  us — a 
man  on  a  bicycle  shot  out  of  an  alley, 
stopped  and  turned.  Behind  him  came  a 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  21 

man  on  horseback,  a  rifle  slung  over  his 
shoulder.  He,  too,  pulled  up.  They  wore 
grey  uniforms.  They  wore  spiked  helmets 
—they  were  Germans  ! 

The  man  on  the  horse  was  tall,  lithe, 
tanned  to  a  brick-red.  He  stood,  looking 
over  the  populace  with  a  kind  of  sarcastic 
smile.  And  suddenly  both  men  unslung 
their  rifles. 

We  all  had,  I  think,  the  same  thought. 
Belgians  behind — Germans  before — street 
firing  about  to  begin.  I  ran  for  a  doorway, 
and  found  it  amply  occupied  by  one  of 
our  party.  Losing  no  time,  I  got  up  an 
alley  which  the  members  of  our  expedition 
called  afterwards  by  my  name.  Dosch 
followed.  Alone,  McCutcheon  stood  his 
ground,  posting  himself  at  the  entrance 
of  the  alley  ready  to  go  when  the  firing 
really  did  commence. 

There  was  no  firing ;  we  began  to 
perceive  that  the  Belgians  had  been  simply 
running  away  to  hide.  Now  came  other 
horsemen  to  join  the  first  scout.  The 
road  was  blocked  in  that  direction.  Aim- 
lessly, we  wandered  back  the  way  we 
had  come.  We  neared  Le  Lion  Rouge  de 


22      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

Belgique — and  lo  !  we  were  beholding  the 
passage  of  an  army  ! 

It  was  the  head  of  the  line.  First 
came  motor-cycles  ;  then  bicycles  ;  then 
troop  after  troop  of  Uhlan  lancers,  dust- 
grey  men  on  coal-black  horses,  riding  as 
though  on  parade.  The  knots  of  people 
in  the  streets  began  to  press  forward,  as 
though  drawn  by  a  fascination  of  curiosity 
stronger  than  theis  fears  ;  and  we  pressed 
on  with  them.  The  cavalry  was  still 
going  on — grey,  grim,  perfectly  ordered. 
As  we  came  near  Le  Lion  Rouge,  a  new 
detachment  was  passing.  At  the  head 
rode  a  scout ;  I  saw  him  outlined  against 
the  sky,  and  he  remains  a  photograph  in 
my  memory.  He  was  a  tall,  lean  man  on 
a  long,  lean  bay  horse.  He  rode  with  the 
short  English  stirrup,  his  knees  up  toward 
the  withers.  He  held  his  gun,  unslung,  by 
the  grip  and  trigger,  and  he  faced  us  as  he 
rode.  His  whole  attitude  was  that  of 
tense  alertness.  No  one  in  the  crowd 
moved.  That  attitude  meant  business. 

It  must  have  been  just  afterward  when, 
down  the  straggling  village  street  which 
leads  towards  Brussels,  came  a  heavy 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  23 

shot,  followed  by  the  lighter  "  whip  "  of 
a  service  rifle  and,  after  a  moment,  by  a 
scattering  volley.  "  Street  firing  has 
begun,"  we  thought.  It  was  not  that,  I 
know  now  ;  it  was  the  thing  which  the 
world  has  already  come  to  know  by  the 
polite  word  "  reprisals." 

A  whirring,  very  irritating  in  that 
stretched  silence  which  followed,  sounded 
from  above.  We  looked  up.  A  heavy  grey 
biplane,  flying  very  low,  was  running 
overhead — the  eye  of  the  column. 

There  was  a  short  space  between  each 
detachment.  And  in  the  interval  the  silent 
crowd — not  even  a  child  cried — would  come 
out  of  the  doorways  and  creep  cautiously 
toward  the  corner. 

Then,  as  each  new  detachment  appeared, 
you  could  hear  the  shuffle  of  their  wooden 
shoes  as  they  ran  to  hide  in  doorways, 
from  which  a  fascination  stronger  than  the 
sense  of  safety  ever  drew  them  out 
again. 

Until  now  we  had  held  to  the  theory 
that  this  was  only  a  cavalry  dash  on 
Brussels — for  we  had  seen  only  cavalry 
so  far.  But  as  we  listened  there  came  a 


24      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

sound  heavier  than  the  ring  of  hoofs  on 
the  macadam  roads  ;  and  then — singing. 
Round  the  corner  swung  the  head  of  an 
infantry  brigade  giving  full  voice  to  "  Die 
Wacht  am  Rhein."  They  were  singing 
in  absolute  time  ;  they  were  singing  in 
parts,  like  a  trained  chorus  !  Never  have 
I  heard  anything  quite  like  the  beat  and 
ring  of  their  marching.  They  wore  heavy, 
knee-high  cowhide  boots  ;  and  those  boots, 
propelled  by  heavy,  stalwart  German 
bodies,  struck  the  roads  with  a  concerted 
shuffling  thump  which  shook  the  earth. 
Singing  sounded  behind  us—  '  Hail  to  the 
War  Lord."  Along  that  street  by  which 
we  had  entered  Louvain  came  another 
column  of  infantry,  timed  perfectly  to  fit 
into  the  plan  of  march.  This  regiment,  I 
take  it,  must  have  been  recruited  in  some 
intellectual  centre.  Half  the  men  wore 
spectacles ;  they  had  the  sharp  faces 
characteristic  of  the  German  scholar.  In- 
tent on  their  singing  and  their  marching, 
looking  neither  to  right  nor  left,  they 
shuffled  and  stamped  on  to  conquest  and 
death.  It  had  become  a  horde  by  now— 
cavalry,  infantry,  artillery,  cavalry,  infan- 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  25 

try,  artillery,  rolling,  pouring  toward 
Brussels  and  toward  France. 

Firing  broke  out  at  the  front — the  crackle 
and  rattle  of  small  arms.  The  Germans 
had  struck  that  skirmish  line.  Here  was 
something  to  see.  On  a  hill  toward  our 
right  stood  an  old  convent.  We  started 
for  that  eminence  to  get  a  view.  And  as 
we  started,  an  excited  Belgian  ran  across 
our  path  shouting :  "  Regardez,  mes- 
sieurs !  "  Into  the  convent  gate  were 
pouring  men  in  blue-and-red  uniforms — 
the  Belgian  colours.  At  that  point  came 
the  second  panic  of  our  crowded  day. 
Again  we  stood  in  the  line  of  fire,  if  firing 
there  was  to  be.  Myself,  I  damaged  a 
hedge. 

Here,  by  the  way,  came  a  miracle.  I 
began  to  speak  French.  Years  ago  I 
took  one  college  course  in  French  ;  and 
since  then  I  have  acquired,  for  my  own 
pleasure,  a  good  reading  knowledge.  I 
had  never  tried  to  speak  it,  except  to 
order  a  meal.  I  had  believed  that  it  was 
too  late  in  life  for  me  to  begin.  Now  it 
became  necessary  for  me  to  speak,  and, 
like  the  puppy  thrown  into  the  water,  I 


26      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

swam.  I  came  back  from  Louvain  a 
French  conversationalist. 

Before  Le  Lion  Rouge  stood  a  group 
of  townspeople,  a  little  recovered  from 
their  first  panic ;  they  dared  crowd  up 
close  to  the  line  of  marching  Germans 
and  to  talk  in  low  voices.  I  singled  out 
an  intelligent-looking  man,  explained  our 
predicament,  and  asked  for  the  town 
authorities.  He  waved  his  hand  toward 
the  Hotel  de  Ville  ;  and  as  he  did  so,  a 
sarcastic  gleam  lit  his  grey,  Flemish  eye. 
"  A  grand  chance  you  have  to  live,"  he 
said — or  its  French  equivalent.  For  by 
now,  though  some  held  out  for  keeping 
close  and  waiting  our  chance  to  get  out 
privately,  most  of  our  party  favoured 
giving  ourselves  up  as  soon  as  possible. 
We  had  heard  that  the  German  army 
carries  along  no  war  correspondents,  and 
that  for  hostile  correspondents  caught 
within  their  lines  there  was  a  short  shrift. 
What  our  status  was  we  did  not  know. 

I  had  at  first  the  dim,  ridiculous  idea 
of  making  ourselves  known  to  the  burgo- 
master, and  asking  his  advice.  We  did 
not  know,  of  course,  that  he,  poor  man, 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  27 

was  already  a  hostage — and  that  he  was 
to  pay  the  debt  with  his  life  ! 

We  started  for  the  Hotel  de  Ville. 
Still  the  Germans  streamed  and  streamed 
through  byways  and  alleys  and  thorough- 
fares— a  resistless  flood,  a  horde,  a  grey 
avalanqhe.  Under  perfect  discipline,  they 
looked  neither  to  right  nor  left.  Here 
and  there  a  group  of  inhabitants,  noting 
our  strange,  foreign  clothes  and  speech, 
gave  us  one  glance  of  the  eye.  A  town 
policeman  in  blue  came  down  the  street, 
escorted  by  a  man  ringing  a  bell.  He 
stopped  and  made  an  announcement  to 
the  crowd.  They  were  to  return  to  their 
homes  and  "  rest  tranquil,"  he  said.  From 
whom,  I  asked  him,  came  those  orders. 
"  From  the  Germans,  of  course,"  he  said, 
with  a  kind  of  contempt  for  my  stupidity. 

Still  we  pressed  on,  because  there  was 
nothing  else  to  do.  By  now  we  saw 
that  this  was  not  a  village,  but  a  city. 
And  suddenly,  on  a  turn  of  the  crooked, 
mediaeval  street,  we  came  out  on  a  square 
bordered  with  tall,  dark  buildings.  Even 
at  that  moment  I  noted  the  massive, 
Gothic  church  to  the  left,  and  the  tall 


28      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

structure,  looking  as  though  made  of  old 
black  lace,  to  the  right.  This  was  the 
Hotel  de  Ville.  And  under  it  lay — a  police 
station.  The  square  was  filled  with  an 
orderly  confusion  of  great,  high-powered 
automobiles.  German  officers,  immaculate 
in  spite  of  their  hard  advance,  stiff- 
shouldered,  many  of  them  wearing  mono- 
cles, were  descending  and  mounting  ;  before 
the  fashionable  club  of  the  city,  orderlies 
were  unloading  kits. 

The  police,  in  a  condition  of  nervous, 
strained  anxiety,  had  no  time  for  us. 
Seeing  the  burgomaster  ?  They  laughed. 
Were  there  any  Americans  in  town  ? 
They  did  not  know.  Had  we  an  American 
consul  ?  They  threw  out  a  list  on  the 
table.  Argentina,  Brazil,  Bolivia,  Chile, 
France — but  no  United  States.  To  what 
German  authority  should  we  report  our- 
selves ?  They  did  not  know.  We  stumbled 
out  again.  A  boy  whom  we  had  picked 
up  as  guide  told  me  that  M.  Saabe  of  the 
Berlitz  school  spoke  English.  We  tried 
the  office  and  residence  of  M.  Saabe.  He 
was  not  at  home.  A  passer-by  informed 
us  that  in  the  Spanish  college — we  knew 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  29 

by  now  that  Louvain  was  a  seat  of  learning 
—lived  a  man  who  took  charge  of  American 
affairs.  We  found  him.  He  did — of  South 
American  affairs.  He  spoke  no  English, 
but  he  took  us  for  Englishmen.  When  I 
explained  that  we  were  Americans,  I  caught 
a  shade  on  his  countenance.  No,  he  was 
sorry  to  say  there  were  no  Americans  in 
Louvain.  He  could  offer  no  suggestions. 
And  all  that  time,  I  pause  to  say,  there 
stood  half  a  mile  away  an  American 
college,  flying  the  Stars  and  Stripes,  in- 
habited by  American  priests,  hungry  for 
companionship  of  their  own.  We  never 
knew  that  either  until  just  before  we 
marched  out  of  Louvain  ! 

All  this  time  the  horde  rolled  on  and 
on.  Night  was  falling ;  it  was  necessary 
to  find  quarters.  We  wandered  back  to- 
ward the  plaza  over  which  frowned  the 
Hotel  de  Ville.  The  officers  had  distributed 
themselves  by  now,  and  from  three  quarters 
German  columns  of  infantry  were  surging 
into  the  square,  singing  as  they  went — a 
grey  flood  that  poured  and  poured,  at 
once  an  avalanche  and  a  machine.  Here, 
I  remember,  McCutcheon,  who  had  hitherto 


30      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

maintained  stoutly  that  we  might  find  a 
way  back  to  Brussels  that  night,  turned  to 
me  and  said  simply  and  solemnly  :  '  Will, 
we'll  never  get  back  to  Brussels." 

Here,  too,  we  saw  a  more  sinister  sign 
of  German  occupation.  Down  the  street 
came  four  Belgian  youths  with  Red  Cross 
brassards  on  their  arms.  They  were  car- 
rying a  litter  which  bore  a  covered  dead 
body.  Two  priests,  their  heads  bowed, 
walked  behind.  Reprisals  again,  of  course 
—the  finished  product  of  a  firing  squad. 

Just  then  a  voice  spoke  at  my  shoulder 
in  English.  Were  we  the  American 
gentlemen  ?  It  was  M.  Saabe,  who  had 
got  news  of  us  and  had  picked  us  by 
our  appearance.  He  spoke  both  English 
and  German.  We  engaged  him  at  once. 
He  guided  us  from  hotel  to  hotel.  The 
Suisse  and  Metropole  were  full  of  German 
officers ;  the  sentries  did  not  allow  us 
within  a  block  of  them.  On  the  square 
before  the  station  stood  a  line  of  humble 
railroad  hotels.  All  of  these  were  full 
save  the  little  Hotel  des  Mille  Colonnes, 
which  had  four  beds  to  spare,  though  no 
food.  We  established  ourselves  and  sat 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  31 

in  the  open-air  cafe  before  the  door, 
wondering  what  to  do.  It  seemed  best 
to  give  ourselves  up  that  night.  But  to 
whom  ? 

As  we  sat  arguing  the  question  I  saw 
three  officers  descend  from  one  of  those 
eternal  grey  automobiles  shooting  round 
every  corner  in  defiance  of  all  speed 
laws.  They  looked  to  me  like  extremely 
agreeable  human  beings,  especially  one 
tall  fellow,  who  laughed  as  he  dismounted. 
I  pointed  them  out.  The  rest  agreed 
with  me.  And  on  the  impulse  of  men  who 
want  to  get  a  disagreeable  operation  over, 
we  rose  and  followed  them  into  the  cafe. 
I  approached  the  tall  fellow  and  began 
to  explain  in  French. 

"  This  gentleman  speaks  English,"  he 
said,  pointing  to  a  little  captain.  I  ex- 
plained again  in  the  mother  tongue.  He 
looked  at  me  severely. 

"  How  did  you  get  here  ?  "    he  asked. 

"  In  a  taxicab,"  I  replied. 

"  In  a  taxicab  !  "  he  repeated,  and  burst 
into  roars  of  Germanic  laughter.  Through 
his  gasps  he  translated  to  the  others. 
Their  laughter  rattled  the  windows. 


32      MEN,    WOMEN   AND   WAR 

"  You  came  right  through  a  battle  in  a 
taxicab  !  "  repeated  the  Herr  officer  who 
spoke  English,  and  went  off  again  into 
roars  of  laughter. 

Into  the  group  stepped  a  young  captain 
whom  I  shall  remember  all  my  life  as  one 
of  the  bonniest,  blithest,  most  attractive 
men  I  ever  saw. 

"  Americans  !  "  he  said  in  almost  perfect 
English.  "  I've  been  to  New  York.  Do 
you  know — "  and  he  rattled  off  a  string  of 
names,  among  which  we  recognised  those 
of  Herman  Metz  and  John  Fox.  He 
insisted  on  buying  beer.  He  exploded 
over  Cobb's  account  of  our  adven- 
tures. 

"  But  you  must  come  with  me  to  the 
Adjutant,"  he  said. 

So,  under  his  escort,  and  chatting  so- 
ciably all  the  way  of  New  York  and  the 
war,  we  marched  to  the  ancient  Palais 
de  Justice,  already  headquarters  of  the 
General  Staff.  In  the  courtyard  without 
stood,  parked,  their  automobiles  and  the 
heavy  trucks  which  carried  their  luggage. 
Two  companies  of  infantry,  weary  but 
still  erect,  stood  guard.  The  Captain  left 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  33 

us  outside.     After  a  few  minutes  he  re- 
turned. 

'  The  Adjutant  cannot  see  you  until 
morning,"  he  said.  "  But  you  must  stay 
in  Louvain  for  the  present.  I  will  give 
you  a  letter  to  him  !  ':  He  opened  a  kind 
of  flat  leather  haversack  which  he  wore 
slung  under  his  left  arm.  There  was 
within  a  perfect  writing  desk.  From  one 
compartment  he  took  a  writing  pad,  from 
another  a  pencil,  from  another  an  envelope, 
from  another  an  official  stamp.  His  note 
finished,  he  replaced  his  stationery  in  the 
proper  compartments  and  closed  the 
writing  kit  with  a  snap  which  expressed 
all  the  methodical  efficiency  of  the  German 
army. 

We  dined  that  night  on  "  delicatessen," 
which  we  found  at  a  store  not  yet  bought 
out,  for  the  Germans  were  buying,  not 
looting.  As  we  sat  eating  at  the  beer 
tables  of  our  little  hotel,  detachment  after 
detachment  of  German  privates,  released 
from  the  ranks  by  some  special  permission, 
came  in  for  beer.  They  were  terribly 
hungry  ;  they  glanced  eagerly  at  our  food, 
but  made  no  move  to  seize  it.  This  was 

D 


34      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

a  forced  march  :  the  authorities,  I  take 
it,  intended  to  feed  the  army  from  the 
confiscated  food  supply  of  Brussels.  We 
gave  them  the  remnants  of  our  meal,  and 
they  ate  it  all,  even  to  the  cheese  rinds. 
Some  spoke  a  little  French  and  English. 
From  them  we  got  tales  of  town  wrecking 
further  back  on  the  line — of  inhabitants 
who  had  fired  upon  them  or  killed  them 
while  they  slept,  and  of  the  terrible 
German  vengeance.  They  made  no  bones 
of  this  fact.  But  they  told  it  soberly, 
prosaically — not  with  the  devil  light  of  the 
eye  which  illuminated  certain  German 
accounts  of  atrocities  which  I  heard  later, 
when  the  campaign  grew  hot. 

A  stalwart,  intelligent-looking  soldier 
came  over  to  our  table.  He  spoke  a  few 
words  of  French,  McCutcheon  a  few  words 
of  German.  When  he  learned  that  we 
were  Americans,  he  managed  to  inquire 
if  we  were  football  players.  Dosch  and  I 
acknowledged  that  we  had  been.  He 
shook  hands.  He  was  a  forward  on  the 
German  International  Soccer  Team.  I 
had  seen  him  play  at  the  last  Olympic 
games  in  that  remote  age  when  the 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  35 

world  was  trying  to  replace  war  by 
sport ! 

All  that  night  we  woke  at  intervals  to 
hear  the  rumble,  rumble,  rumble  of  great 
steel  machines,  the  shuffling  tramp  of 
great  human  machines,  the  pop-pop  of 
automobiles  and  motor-cycles  running  at 
top  speed,  the  buzzing  as  of  giant  bees 
from  the  aeroplanes  overhead.  All  that 
night  we  rose  at  intervals  to  see  the  square 
before  the  station  piling  up  with  the 
rear-guard  tunnage  of  an  army.  The  horde 
was  still  pouring  through  when  we  awoke. 
It  was  to  pour  through  without  intermis- 
sion for  three  days,  until  earth  and  air 
and  sky  became  all  one  great  grey  machine 
to  manufacture  death,  until  even  the 
eternal  singing  became  not  a  cheering 
sound,  but  only  the  buzzing  of  the 
wheels. 

That  morning  —  it  was  Thursday  — 
Cobb,  elected  spokesman  because  of  his 
cordial  ways  and  his  wit,  had  two  inter- 
views with  the  Adjutant.  He  came  back 
from  the  first  one  grinning  broadly. 

"  Well,  boys,"  he  said,  "  we're  still  the 
joke  of  the  German  army  !  ':  The  Adjutant, 

D  2 


36      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

too,  had  roared  when  he  heard  of  the 
taxicab.  He,  too,  had  translated,  and 
the  Palais  de  Justice  had  rung  with 
Germanic  laughter. 

"  I  should  say,  gentlemen,"  Cobb  quoted 
the  Adjutant,  "  that  you  owe  your  present 
delicate  situation  to  an  inordinate  desire 
for  travel  or  to  an  excessive  appetite. 
You  know  we  have  no  correspondents 
with  the  German  army." 

"  Well,  you've  got  four  now  !  "  said 
Cobb. 

" 1  know — and  it's  not  your  fault,  since 
we  came  to  you,  not  you  to  us,"  said  the 
Adjutant.  "  At  the  same  time  it  would 
be  dangerous  for  you,  and  certainly  indis- 
creet for  us,  to  send  you  through  our 
lines  to  Brussels  now.  There  have  been 
reprisals  along  the  road.  Some  of  our 
men  become  brutes  when  their  comrades 
are  attacked,  and  some  fool  lieutenant 
might  exceed  his  authority."  The  Adju- 
tant spoke  perfect  English — even  a  little 
American  slang.  His  sister-in-law  came 
from  Dayton,  Ohio,  and  he  had  visited 
that  city. 

In    a    second    interview    the    Adjutant 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  37 

gave  some  orders  disguised  as  polite  advice. 
4  The  Secret  Service  has  already  reported 
your  presence  and  movements,"  he  said. 
"  In  giving  yourselves  up  at  once  you 
acted  discreetly.  I  have  sent  word  forward 
to  your  Minister,  and  I  should  not  be 
surprised  to  hear  from  him  to-night.  Re- 
main quietly  in  your  hotel.  Go  out  to 
meals  if  you  wish,  go  out  for  a  drink  if 
you  wish,  but  show  no  curiosity  about 
our  movements,  and  talk  as  little  as 
possible  with  our  officers  and  men.  Take 
no  notes.  Avoid  out-of-the-way  quarters 
of  the  town.  You  are  our  guests,  but  we 
are  very  busy.  I  shall  send  for  you  when 
it  is  time  to  go." 

All  day  Thursday  we  waited  while  the 
horde  rolled  on,  and  all  day  Friday. 
M.  Saabe  found  us  a  heavenly  Flemish 
cook,  a  little  woman  with  a  Rembrandt 
Madonna  face  and  a  motherly  care  for 
the  stranger.  She  could  have  made  a 
pasteboard  box  into  a  salad.  Of  meat 
there  was  supposed  to  be  none  in  Louvain  ; 
but  every  day  she  found  somehow  a  piece 
of  fresh  veal  or  of  ham.  Poor  soul,  she 
was  approaching  the  time  for  her  child, 


38      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

and  it  was  near  her  house  that  the  destruc- 
tion of  Louvain  began.  We  walked  down 
to  her  house  for  meals ;  once  we  made  an 
expedition  to  get  a  bath  ;  otherwise  we 
read,  played  cards,  talked — and  waited. 
Every  time  an  automobile  coursed  round 
the  corner  we  rose,  taking  it  for  the 
messenger  from  the  embassy.  And  all 
the  while  that  grey  flood  which  seemed  to 
be  engulfing  the  world  rolled  forever  on, 
as  certain  and  regular  as  time,  as  endless 
as  eternity. 

It  was  Friday  night,  and  only  wagon 
transport  seemed  to  be  coming  through. 
There  was  cannonading  that  day  in  the 
direction  of  Malines  and  Antwerp.  We 
did  not  know  what  it  meant ;  none  in  the 
world  was  more  ignorant  of  the  world's 
news  than  we.  Proclamation  after  pro- 
clamation had  gone  forth  concerning  the 
behaviour  of  the  inhabitants — an  indication 
that  the  situation  was  growing  ticklish. 
The  latest  ordered  everyone  to  bed  at 
eight,  ordered  all  windows  closed  and  all 
doors  unlocked,  ordered  a  light  in  every 
window  all  night.  Taking  no  chances  on 
firing  from  our  hotel,  we  made  the  pro- 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  39 

prietor,  regardless  of  expense,  give  us 
all  the  front  rooms.  It  was  approaching 
eight,  and  the  last  civilians  had  deserted 
the  streets,  when  an  automobile  coursed 
up  to  our  door  and  a  soldier  sprang  out. 
Relief  at  last — we  jumped  to  our  feet. 

But  it  was  only  our  old  friend,  the 
international  football  player,  very  hungry 
— as  he  showed  by  pointing  to  his  stomach 
and  his  mouth — eager  to  find  something 
to  "  essen."  He  talked  fast  in  German, 
and  I  got  the  word  "  Waterloo."  Some- 
thing had  been  happening  at  Waterloo. 

"  Krieg  ?  Bataille  ?  Battle  ?  "  I  asked. 

"  Yah  !  "    he  said,  and  turned  away. 

Depressing  news !  Waterloo  is  just 
beyond  Brussels.  If  the  Germans  had 
struck  there  the  main  force  of  the  Allies, 
the  battle  might  last  a  week.  During 
that  week  none  would  pass  us  through 
the  defences.  And  if  the  Allies  won — 
we  were  in  the  back  track  of  a  beaten 
army,  retreating,  through  massacres  and 
reprisals,  in  a  hostile  country.  We  had 
learned  only  half  an  hour  before  that 
there  really  was  an  American  college  in 
Louvain.  The  Belgian  tobacconist  who 


40      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

dropped  this  information  in  his  offhand 
way  assured  us  that  he  meant  "  1'Amerique 
du  Nord,"  not  "  du  Sud."  They  had  a  flag 
with  many  stripes.  They  had  a  statue 
of  an  "  Indien  sauvage  " —Sitting  Bull. 
We  made  up  our  minds  that  in  the  morning 
we  would  report  ourselves  at  the  American 
college.  We  started  a  game  of  cards, 
and  lost  interest  after  the  first  hand. 
One  by  one  we  crawled  to  bed.  And  we 
slept  heavily,  miserably,  in  air-tight  rooms, 
the  oxygen  burned  out  by  the  lamps. 

Next  morning  I  realised  that  the  rumble 
had  stopped.  I  looked  toward  the  station  ; 
the  grey  line  no  longer  rounded  the  corner 
into  the  town.  A  few  German  soldiers 
were  stringing  telegraph  wires,  a  few  sen- 
tries paced  up  and  down  at  the  corners ; 
otherwise  there  was  only  the  litter  and 
reek  that  an  army  leaves  behind.  The 
inhabitants  walked  about  their  customary 
business,  as  people  a  little  relieved  from 
the  strain.  And  while  we  looked, 
McCutcheon  said  :  "  A  Brussels  taxicab  !  " 

There  it  was  with  its  meter  and  its 
capped  chauffeur  and  two  woman  passen- 
gers !  The  road  must  be  free.  We  waited 


DETAINED  BY  THE  GERMANS  41 

no  longer,  but  went  straight  to  the  Ad- 
jutant. The  transport  of  the  General 
Staff  was  moving  from  the  square — half 
the  automobiles  were  gone  already  and 
the  rest  were  packing.  The  guard  had 
dwindled  to  a  squad,  which  lay  resting 
in  the  straw,  droning  "  Die  Wacht  am 
Rhein." 

"  Gentlemen,  you  are  free  to  go,"  said 
the  Adjutant.  "  The  road  is  clear.  I 
should  recommend  the  road  by  Tervueren. 
I  sent  a  message  to  your  Minister  yester- 
day." 

That  message,  by  the  way,  was  never 
delivered.  When  we  tumbled  our  un- 
kempt persons  into  the  embassy  that 
afternoon,  Brand  Whitlock  welcomed  us 
as  from  the  dead.  We  had  been  reported 
missing  for  four  days. 

It  was  the  last  we  were  ever  to  see  of 
the  Louvain  that  we  knew.  A  week  or 
so  later,  it  was  blotted  from  the  face  of 
the  earth.  We  had  made  an  engagement 
with  madame,  with  the  courteous  M. 
Saabe,  to  come  back  when  the  war  was 
done.  I  think  now  that  under  their 
Flemish  courtesy  lay  a  sense  of  the  truth 


42      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

— a  perception  of  the  powder  mine  upon 
which  they  were  sitting ;  for  I  remember 
that  they  were  very  grave  when  we  sug- 
gested this  return.  They  were  of  God's 
good  people,  who  served  the  stranger  for 
God's  love  ;  and  about  them  centres  my 
anxiety  for  the  city  whose  name  is  written 
on  the  world's  heart — Louvain. 


II 

THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR 
September,  1914 

MY  memories  of  Belgium,  in  the  stricken 
time,  centre  about  this  city  of  Louvain. 
She,  with  her  tragic  death  as  a  city,  sums 
up  for  me  the  rear  of  war,  the  train  of 
blighted  lives,  of  suffering,  of  fear,  of 
hopeless,  utter  misery  which  it  leaves 
behind. 

Louvain,  as  we  found  it,  was  a  pretty 
and  quiet  University  town — our  own  Ithaca, 
or  Cambridge,  or  Oxford,  with  a  Belgian 
and  churchly  twist.  The  Roman  Catholic 
Church  of  the  world  maintained  it ;  this 
university  was  the  finishing  school  for  the 
priesthood  ;  even  in  America  it  is  a  boast 
of  a  Roman  Catholic  priest  that  he  studied 
at  Louvain. 

Besides  the  university,  the  town  in- 
cluded a  brewery,  famous  for  its  sour 


43 


44      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

beer,  and  a  few  glass  works.  The  people, 
like  all  the  Belgians,  were  a  merry  and 
peaceable  lot.  And  suddenly — in  the  space 
of  three  weeks — Louvain  was  in  the  midst 
of  an  unjustified,  an  uncalled  for  war. 
Suddenly  her  best  and  most  vigorous  sons 
found  themselves  "  called  to  the  colours." 
Gradually  the  wounded  crept  back,  to  fill 
the  nunneries  and  monasteries.  There 
came  a  day  when  the  guns  thundered  and 
the  rifles  rattled  at  their  very  city  gates. 
Another  day,  and  a  bedraggled,  wounded, 
sullen  Belgian  army  poured  through  the 
town  in  retreat.  All  that  day,  refugees 
came  into  Louvain,  carrying  their  poor 
little  necessities  in  bundles  ;  before  noon, 
this  horde  of  misery  was  pouring  on,  stupid 
with  grief  and  fear,  toward  Brussels. 

By  then,  it  was  all  over.  The  burgo- 
master, an  old,  sick  man,  soon  to  pay  for 
the  conduct  of  his  city  with  his  liberty,  had 
met  the  invader  at  the  Malines  gate,  had 
been  seized  as  a  hostage,  had  delivered 
over  the  keys,  the  government,  the  whole 
conduct  of  his  city,  to  the  invaders. 

Our  party  arrived  from  one  direction 
just  as  the  great,  grey  hordes  of  Germans 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR       45 

came  from  the  other.  In  glimpses  here 
and  there,  we  witnessed  the  thorough 
manner  in  which  the  German  army  takes 
possession  of  a  conquered  town.  Plainly, 
they  knew  every  alley,  every  seat  of  muni- 
cipal activity,  in  this  city  which  they  had 
come  to  conquer.  Within  an  hour  the 
generals,  the  princeling  who  accompanied 
this  army,  and  the  higher  staff  officers, 
had  been  assigned  to  quarters  at  the 
Table  Ronde,  the  fashionable  club  of  Lou- 
vain.  Their  eternal,  grey  automobiles  had 
unloaded  their  kit,  the  servants  of  the  club 
were  at  work  getting  dinner. 

The  staff  officers  quartered  themselves 
at  the  best  hotels  in  the  city  ;  one  could 
not  get  within  a  block  of  the  entrance. 

That  night,  one  of  us  saw  the  head- 
quarters of  the  General  Staff.  They  had 
gone  straight  to  the  Palais  de  Justice,  the 
court  house  of  Louvain,  and  taken  im- 
mediate and  familiar  possession.  A  battery 
of  typewriters,  manned  by  soldier  and 
civilian  clerks,  was  hard  at  work.  Long 
before  that,  the  windows  and  walls  bore 
a  proclamation  in  French  and  Flemish, 
announcing  the  names  of  three  hostages 


46      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

who  had  been  seized  for  the  good  behaviour 
of  the  town,  and  commanding  the  citizens 
to  "  rest  tranquil  "  in  their  homes.  The 
Germans  had  brought  along  the  printing- 
press  which  turned  out  this  notice,  and 
the  linguists  who  put  it  into  French  and 
Flemish. 

Wherever  we  turned,  we  saw  that  same 
methodical,  cold-blooded  efficiency,  that 
provision  for  everything. 

The  very  automobiles,  shooting  round 
every  corner  at  reckless  speed,  carried 
musical  horns,  whose  notes  indicated  the 
rank  and  command  of  their  occupants. 
A  two-toned  bugle,  very  soft  and  musical, 
proclaimed  the  coming  of  the  generals  and 
the  high  staff  officers,  for  whom  everyone 
must  make  way. 

More  marvellous  than  anything  else, 
however,  was  the  absolute  system  with 
which  they  carried  through  Louvain, 
almost  without  halt  or  stop,  what  must 
have  been  two  whole  German  armies. 
Through  the  Grande  Place,  toward  which 
three  lines  moved,  from  which  three  lines 
converged,  the  flow  was,  for  three  whole 
days,  continuous. 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      47 

A  great  grey  machine — the  word  which 
has  been  spoken  so  often  of  the  German 
army,  and  which  must  be  repeated,  because 
there  is  no  other.  And  mostly  it  was 
literally  a  machine.  To  an  extent  which 
no  one  foresaw  this  has  been  a  war  of 
automobiles.  Many  of  these  had  been 
hastily  armoured  against  barbed-wire  en- 
tanglements. In  front  would  be  a  double 
scythe,  sharp  and  strong,  overhead  would 
run  a  steel  framework,  to  hoist  the  cut 
and  tangled  wires  out  of  the  way  of  the 
occupants. 

The  human  machines  who  sat  on  these 
inhuman  machines  all  belonged  to  the 
same  blond,  stolid  silent  type  of  North 
German.  The  infantry  regiments,  and 
sometimes  the  solid  ranks  of  Uhlan  cavalry, 
marched  through  the  town,  singing ;  and 
that  was  the  only  human  sign  they  gave. 
The  army,  as  yet  out  of  contact  with  the 
enemy — for  these  troops  had  not  fought 
at  Liege — was  working  perfectly,  all  its 
units  still  under  absolute  control. 

The  time  came  when  this  or  that  de- 
tachment, sent  abroad  for  some  military 
purpose,  dropped  out  of  line  for  a  glass 


48      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

of  beer,  or  for  some  food ;  for  they  were 
all  ravenously  hungry  on  this  forced 
march  to  take  Brussels.  And  the  human 
side,  a  rather  kindly  and  cordial  side, 
began  to  show.  Lou  vain  being  a  brewing 
centre,  there  was  plenty  of  beer.  The 
lucky  detachments  hurried  to  the  cafes 
and  bars.  Some  of  them  invaded  our 
hotel.  Here  and  there  was  a  scholar  who 
spoke  English.  We  bought  them  beer ; 
we  chummed  with  them.  A  little  soldier 
boy,  to  whom  we  gave  a  cheese  sandwich 
from  our  own  "  delicatessen  "  supper,  told 
us  that  he  was  from  Hamburg ;  he  had 
sailed  to  America ;  there  it  was  where  he 
learned  his  English.  They  had  come  a 
long  way  that  day  ;  he  had  seen  no  fighting 
but  he  had  helped  destroy  a  town.  c  They 
shot  at  us,"  he  said,  "  and  we  killed 
them."  All  this  in  the  most  matter  of 
fact  way. 

The  officers  we  met  fall  into  two 
classes  :  there  is  the  traditional  Prussian 
martinet,  who  shoves  civilians  off  the 
sidewalk ;  he  keeps  his  manners  in  war. 
There  is  also  a  class  of  cordial  university- 
trained  human  beings,  who  are  pleasant  to 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      49 

all  men  save  their  enemies.  Such  of  these 
as  spoke  French  or  English  joked  with  us 
over  our  presence  in  Louvain,  traded 
reminiscences  of  America  and  England, 
bought  us  beer.  They  also  spoke  in  the 
same  strain  as  the  men  concerning  re- 
prisals ;  on  these  they  had  a  perfectly 
Germanic  point  of  view.  Inhabitants  had 
fired  on  them ;  an  infantry  colonel  had 
been  killed  as  he  slept ;  when  these  things 
happened,  they  followed  their  own  inex- 
orable rule  :  "  Kill  everyone,  man  or 
woman,  in  a  house  which  has  fired  ;  kill 
everyone  found  with  arms ;  if  there  is 
general  firing,  destroy  the  town." 

It  was  another  day,  during  which  we 
kept  to  quarters  in  our  little  hotel  by 
the  railroad  station,  before  we  began  to 
perceive  that  we  might  be  living  over 
dynamite.  The  sullen  quiet  of  the  citizens, 
creeping  about  such  occupations  as  the 
Germans  left  them,  we  interpreted  for 
absolute  terror.  We  might  have  taken 
a  hint,  indeed,  from  the  remarks  dropped 
by  Madame,  at  our  hotel.  A  detail  of 
soldiers  came  in  to  search  our  rooms  for 
arms.  Madame  walking  nervously  behind, 

E 


50      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

protesting  that  hers  was  a  peaceable 
house. 

More  and  more  proclamations  poured 
from  that  efficient  German  printing-press, 
each  stricter  in  its  tone.  First  came  one 
from  the  burgomaster  and  his  two  fellow 
hostages,  assuring  Louvain  that  their  lives 
were  in  the  hands  of  its  people,  and  begging 
for  order.  Then  one  from  the  Germans, 
commandeering  all  gasoline  ;  then  another 
ordering  the  people  to  cease  circulating 
in  certain  streets,  and  to  keep  indoors  after 
nine  o'clock.  It  was  Wednesday  when 
the  Germans  took  Louvain.  By  Friday 
night,  when  the  rearguard  came  through, 
they  issued  an  imperative  order  concerning 
the  conduct  of  the  Rue  de  la  Station,  and 
the  other  principal  streets.  All  ground- 
floor  doors  must  be  left  unlocked.  All 
windows  must  be  closed  all  night,  and  the 
curtains  drawn.  There  must  be  a  light 
in  every  window. 

By  this  time,  I  think  even  we  had  begun 
to  perceive  the  spluttering  of  the  fuse. 
Our  hotel  faced  the  station  and  the  rail- 
road yards.  Here  worked  the  postal  and 
telegraph  corps — on  the  first  day  the 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      51 

Germans  had  established  a  military  post- 
office,  for  soldiers'  letters  home.  Here, 
also,  were  the  quarters  of  the  farriers,  and 
from  the  area  beyond  rose  and  descended 
the  great  military  aeroplanes. 

In  all  this  orderly  confusion,  we  observed 
a  grey  prison  van  drawn  up  to  a  group  of 
officers  who  stood  near  the  freight  house 
entrance.  The  door  of  the  van  opened ; 
soldiers  and  two  young  men  in  their  shirts 
descended.  There  was  a  brief  conference  ; 
we  saw  someone  reading  a  paper.  The 
soldiers  and  prisoners  remounted  the  van, 
and  drove  off  into  the  railroad  yards.  We 
strained  our  ears  for  firing,  but  the  cars 
rumbled  too  heavily.  Presently,  however, 
round  the  corner  came  four  Belgian  youths, 
wearing  the  insignia  of  the  Red  Cross  ; 
and  they  carried  a  covered  litter.  That 
happened  twice  more  when  we  watched  ; 
once,  just  before  the  van  drove  away,  the 
Belgian  Red  Cross  came  to  our  hotel  for 
a  litter  which  they  had  stored  there  ;  and 
once  I  heard  the  scream  of  a  woman,  as 
though  in  the  final  agony  of  parting.  And 
that  same  morning  we  heard  a  shot  round 
the  corner.  A  few  German  soldiers  ran ; 

E  2 


52      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

then  came  silence.  Presently,  a  prisoner 
went  over  to  the  railroad  yards  ;  then  a 
litter  passed,  the  occupant  moving  his 
head  to  show  that  he  was  alive.  One 
Belgian  in  the  crowd  had  tongue  to  speak. 
"  It  is  a  German  officer,"  he  said,  "  he  is 
wounded  in  the  knee." 

"  How  ?  "  we  asked.  "  By  accident," 
he  said  ;  but  he  blinked  as  he  said  it.  And 
presently  a  corpse  came  back  from  the 
railroad  yards. 

We  had  seen  three  days  of  the  German 
army  by  now  ;  and  it  seemed  to  me,  as  I 
watched  after  this  last  tragedy,  that  the 
whole  world  had  turned  into  a  grey  machine 
of  death — earth  and  air  and  sky.  The 
grey  transport  wagons  rattled  past,  carry- 
ing grey  machines  of  men.  The  grey 
motor  cycles  and  automobiles  streaked 
past,  their  mufflers  cut  out,  chugging  the 
message  of  death. 

Overhead,  the  grey  biplanes  buzzed  with 
a  kind  of  supernatural  power.  The  veiy 
singing  of  the  regiments,  as  they  swung 
in  between  the  baggage  wagons,  seemed 
no  more  a  human  touch.  It  was 
mechanical,  like  the  faces  of  the  men  who 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      53 

sang — it  was  the  music  of  a  music-box. 
And  over  it  all  lay  a  smell  of  which  I 
have  never  heard  mention  in  any  book 
on  war — the  smell  of  a  half-million  un- 
bathed  men,  the  stench  of  a  menagerie 
raised  to  the  nth  power  of  stench.  That 
smell  lay  for  days  over  every  town  through 
which  the  Germans  passed. 

And  as  I  sat  in  the  very  depths  of 
intellectual  despair,  I  saw  a  group  of 
German  officers  looking  toward  the  sky — 
saw  an  unnatural  light  over  everything. 
I  craned  my  neck,  expecting  to  see  a 
monoplane.  It  was  the  eclipse.  Never 
have  I  known  so  dramatic  a  setting  for 
a  mood  of  the  mind  ! 

Next  day  the  Germans,  save  for  the 
garrison  and  a  little  wagon  transport, 
commandeered  hurriedly  from  the  country 
round  about,  were  gone.  We  were  free 
to  return  to  Brussels.  As  we  swung  along, 
in  the  joyful  hurry  of  departure,  we  found 
the  city  rebounding.  The  people  had 
seemed  afraid  to  talk  with  us,  as  though 
distrusting  our  foreign  manners  and 
clothes  in  such  times.  Now  they  crowded 
round  and  chattered  in  French,  or,  occa- 


54      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

sionally,  in  English.  And  they  were 
pathetically  hopeful.  Without  news- 
papers, without  any  authentic  information, 
they  were  grasping,  like  all  Europe,  at 
rumours.  And  these  rumours  were  all 
joyous.  The  French  and  English  had 
sent  money  to  repair  the  devastations  of 
the  Germans.  The  French  had  come  ; 
they  were  fighting  the  Germans  below 
Brussels  ;  the  English  had  destroyed  the 
German  fleet. 

On  the  streets  was  another,  a  sadder 
thing.  Down  highway  and  alley  crept 
funeral  processions,  sometimes  following 
coffins  borne  shoulder-high  by  youths, 
sometimes  little,  plain  Belgian  hearses 
with  a  gilded  cross  atop. 

Yet,  as  we  left,  as  we  saw  the  last 
suburb  of  Louvain  fade  behind  the  hill, 
something  of  the  joyous  mood  had  infected 
me.  Perhaps  Louvain — barring  that  hard 
winter  of  starvation  which  all  Belgium 
must  endure — had  seen  the  worst  of  this 
war.  In  happier  times  I  would  come 
back.  I  should  find  time  then  to  see  the 
interior  of  those  great,  vaulted  churches, 
with  their  treasures  of  the  Middle  Ages, 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      55 

which  had  stood  locked  during  this  curious 
visit.  I  should  find  time  to  laugh  and  to 
mourn  with  the  good  little  Belgian  people 
whom  I  had  met  over  an  old  adventure 
and  an  old  sorrow. 


II 


LET  me  leave  Louvain  for  a  time  ;  I 
am  writing,  after  all,  not  so  much  con- 
cerning that  tragedy  which  all  the  world 
knows,  as  of  war,  and  what  it  does  to  men 
and  countries. 

I  was  again  to  see  the  German  army 
intimately,  three  days  later.  The  machine 
had  gone  on,  clear  through  Belgium,  even 
to  the  borders  of  France.  The  English 
had  made  a  stand  at  Mons,  on  the  left  of 
the  Allied  line.  A  German  flanking  move- 
ment, hurled  unexpectedly  by  means  of 
perfect  transport  at  this  point  had  thrown 
the  English  back  toward  Paris.  A  German 
adjutant,  who  handed  out  information  and 
passes  at  headquarters,  had  said  : 

"  You  can  probably  go  with  these  passes 
at  least  to  the  rear  of  the  army.  We  have 


56      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

some  English  prisoners  on  exhibition. 
Better  go  see  them." 

And  so  two  of  us  rode  in  a  Brussels  cab 
to  Braine-le-Comte,  and  then  walked  to 
Mons. 

We  had  our  passes  ;  and  to  guard  against 
an  over-nervous  trigger  we  tied  on  our 
left  arms  white  handkerchiefs,  that  looked 
at  a  distance  like  Red  Cross  insignia. 

Not  a  village  was  left  intact  in  the  path 
of  the  German  invasion.  Everywhere 
there  were  proclamations.  In  each  town 
and  hamlet,  it  appeared,  the  Germans 
had  seized  their  three  hostages,  to  be  shot 
if  citizens  broke  the  regulation  against 
sniping.  From  walls  and  windows  these 
men  shrieked  in  black-letter  type  for  their 
lives — begged  the  inhabitants  not  to 
molest  the  Germans. 

Hal  and  Braine-le-Comte,  second  class 
cities  like  Louvain,  stood  unscathed ;  but 
the  villages  were  ruined  along  our  way. 
Some  hamlets  were  gone  utterly,  only  the 
walls  standing  after  the  fires  ;  in  one  of 
these  I  found  a  group  of  inhabitants 
poking  about  in  the  hot  ashes,  trying  to 
rescue  what  little  they  had.  All  wore 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR       57 

that  same  expression  of  unemotional 
stupidity  which  I  found  in  Belgium  to  be 
the  brand  and  mark  of  extreme  suffering. 
It  was  a  ruined  country-side,  too.  There 
was  neither  cow  nor  horse  in  the  fields. 
Germany,  I  understand,  thriftily  gathered 
in  her  crops  before  she  went  to  war ; 
Belgium  had  been  caught  napping. 
Such  wheat  as  the  peasants  had  cut, 
stook  blackening  in  the  shocks  ;  the  stand- 
ing wheat  drooped  over-ripe,  and  it  was 
dropping  its  seeds. 

The  eternal  carrot  and  turnip  and 
cabbage  fields,  which  make  Belgium  the 
market  garden  of  western  Europe,  were 
all  untended.  Across  the  fields  coursed 
uncertainly,  heedlessly,  flocks  of  pigeons. 
I  marked  them  narrowly,  wondering  at 
wild  game  birds  in  a  country  so  settled  ; 
and  then  the  truth  flashed  in  upon  me. 
These  were  domestic  pigeons,  whose  home 
cotes  were  gone. 

One  perceives  calamity  like  this  only  in 
little  glimpses  which  typify  the  whole  ;  and 
I  think  I  caught  it  most  typically  in  the 
state  of  the  roads  and  streets.  Anyone 
who  has  ever  motored  over  French  or 


58      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

Belgian  roads,  in  the  far-gone  period  before 
this  war,  knows  them  for  perfection.  Any- 
one who  knows  the  small  French  town, 
knows  that  you  might  take  your  dinner  from 
its  sidewalks.  Now,  the  roadways  were 
cut  into  furrows,  the  gutters  stuffed  with 
garbage  and  dirty  straw,  the  tree-borders 
barked.  The  towns,  so  neat  a  week  before, 
were  dirty  beyond  belief ;  and  over  every- 
thing still  hung  that  stench  of  an 
army. 

We  had  left  Braine-le-Comte,  and  were 
walking  down  the  road,  before  we  caught 
up  with  the  transport  of  the  German 
army.  Amongst  these  men,  as  they  sat 
stolidly  bobbing  up  and  down  on  the  carts, 
or  lolled  at  ease  on  their  horses,  shone  out, 
now  and  then,  a  fine,  powerful,  intellectual 
face.  And  it  always  revived  in  me  the 
chief  intellectual  horror  of  war.  In  these 
ranks,  and  equally  in  the  French  ranks, 
march  incipient  Pasteurs  and  Ehrlichs, 
born  with  the  genius  to  save  suffering  in 
our  world  ;  incipient  Faradays,  born  with 
the  genius  to  interpret  the  forces  of  this 
world  ;  incipient  Rodins  and  Sudermanns, 
born  with  the  genius  to  bring  the  beauty 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      59 

out  of  the  world.  There  they  go,  on  to 
the  chance  of  death  before  the  guns. 

This  was  the  same  army  which  had 
moved  through  Louvain,  but  a  different 
army,  too.  All  along  the  front  there  had 
been  fighting ;  discipline  had  relaxed  a 
little  ;  now  they  noticed  us,  the  strangers, 
but  with  a  kind  of  sullen  ill  will.  The 
first  officer  who  stopped  us  to  inspect  our 
papers  growled  as  he  ordered  us  on.  The 
second  spoke  some  English. 

"  We  have  three  thousand  English 
prisoners,"  he  said  with  a  kind  of  dull 
triumph.  And  then  in  a  querulous  tone, 
44  Tell  me,  you  Americans,  what  are  the 
English  fighting  us  for  ?  Why  are  they 
not  with  us  ?  " 

The  road  reached  a  great,  gardened 
nunnery,  shaded  by  tall  trees.  At  the 
entrance  stood  a  shrine  of  the  Virgin, 
dressed  out  with  flowers,  now  fading. 
There  were  no  nuns  in  sight,  but  only 
Germans  and  the  grey  tunnage  of  a 
German  hospital  train.  All  along  the 
roadside  lay  the  slightly  wounded,  their 
arms  in  slings,  their  heads  bound  up,  a 
dead  look  in  their  eyes.  Each  wore, 


60      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

affixed  to  his  coat,  a  numbered  tag.  From 
time  to  time,  they  passed  a  water-bottle 
down  the  line,  drank,  relapsed  into 
silence. 

We  came,  now,  to  a  little  village  in 
which  only  one  or  two  of  the  houses  had 
been  destroyed.  A  wayside  bar  was  open  ; 
we  stopped  for  a  drink  of  mineral  water, 
ordinary  water  being  dangerous  in  these 
times.  A  little  man,  his  face  lined  and 
seamed  with  anxiety,  crawled  up  to  us  and 
addressed  us  in  East-end  cockney  English. 
He  explained,  quickly,  that  he  was  a 
Belgian,  but  had  lived  a  long  time  in 
London. 

"  It  started  'ere,  gov'ner,"  he  said, 
"  they  shot  off  their  first  cannon  over 
there.  All  night  they  'ad  me  for  guide. 
They  tied  me  'ands.  They  said  they'd 
shoot  me  if  I  guided  them  wrong.  They 
just  let  me  go." 

And  there,  across  the  road,  lay  the 
fresh  signs  of  battle.  A  row  of  trees 
topped  a  rise  ;  behind  it,  the  fields  had 
been  torn  and  trampled  until  the  earth 
showed  brown  instead  of  green.  In  the 
foreground  lay  what  looked  like  a  trench, 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      61 

but  it  was  a  covered  trench  now — "  the 
dead,"  the  Belgian  said. 

And  near  this  point,  we  came  upon  a 
farmhouse  before  which  lounged  a  group 
of  men  in  unfamiliar  uniform.  I  had 
looked  at  them  for  thirty  seconds  before  I 
realised  that  I  was  looking  at  the  uniform 
of  a  Highland  regiment  in  war-khaki. 
They  sat  resting  on  a  kerb,  their  heads 
bowed  ;  they  lay  stretched  out  in  the  road 
in  an  abandon  of  weariness  and  discourage- 
ment. The  insignia  had  been  taken  from 
their  uniforms.  A  detail  of  German  in- 
fantry with  fixed  bayonets  watched  them  ; 
now  and  then  a  soldier  growled  a  surly  order. 

"  May  we  talk  to  them  ?  ':  I  asked  a 
sergeant  who  spoke  French. 

"  Non — non,"  he  growled.  But  as  we 
passed  on,  a  blue  Scotch  eye  here  and  there 
glanced  at  us  with  a  curious  longing,  as 
for  news  and  conversation  from  one  who 
spoke  the  mother  tongue. 

Around  a  bend  appeared  another  line 
of  prisoners,  perhaps  two  or  three  hundred, 
this  time  mostly  in  the  sober  brown  of 
the  British  line  regiments.  These  marched 
wearily,  in  irregular  ranks.  Germans 


62      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

guarded  them  on  all  sides  ;  the  captors 
were  kicking  them  as  they  marched;  the 
English  were  answering  in  low  sullen  oaths 
from  the  corners  of  their  mouths. 

They  passed ;  and,  as  the  wayside  sign 
proved,  we  were  in  the  village  of  Nimy, 
a  suburb  of  Mons. 

Or  what  had  been  Nimy.  In  three 
different  places  it  had  been  set  on  fire. 
The  doors  had  been  battered  in,  the 
windows  broken,  everywhere  on  the 
bricks  were  the  splashes  of  bullets,  of 
whole  volleys  even.  In  the  main  street 
stood  a  little  shoe  store,  its  "  best  lines  " 
displayed  in  a  show  window  and  dressed 
out  with  cards  which  read  :  "  Cheap," 
"  American  fashion,"  and  the  like.  The 
broken  plate  glass  lay  littered  all  over  this 
little  display.  Further  on  was  a  hardware 
store  ;  and  this  showed  marks  of  a  terrible 
struggle.  Someone  had  built  a  barricade 
of  stoves  before  the  door ;  these  stoves 
were  all  battered  and  broken  ;  across  them 
lay  the  wreckage  of  a  door.  Beside  it  a 
fire  had  started.  The  house  was  gutted — 
gone ;  but  the  pear  garden  stood  un- 
touched, the  trees  full  of  ripe  fruit. 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      63 

Here  and  there  was  a  house  unscathed 
amidst  the  ruin.  Always  it  flew  from  a 
window  the  white  flag  of  surrender  ;  always 
on  the  door  was  chalked  in  German  the 
legend — which  we  had  been  seeing  all 
along  the  way — gute  Leute  (good  people). 
A  few  women  stood  dumbly  in  the  door- 
ways of  the  unscathed  houses. 

We  were  in  Mons,  now — a  "  city  of  the 
second  class,"  as  we  should  say  in  America. 
The  rear  guard  was  quartered  here  ;  like 
Louvain  the  week  before,  it  reeked  with 
the  army.  Cavalry  held  the  park ;  wagon 
trains  occupied  the  whole  great  Grande 
Place.  The  walls  were  plastered  with 
proclamations,  announcing  hostages,  beg- 
ging the  citizens  to  be  good,  calling  upon 
all  who  had  brown  leather,  or  men's  shoes 
or  socks,  or  grey  cloth,  to  bring  those  com- 
modities into  headquarters.  The  cafes  made 
a  pretence  of  keeping  open ;  a  few  silent 
guests  even  dined  or  drank  at  the  tables. 

There  were  no  quarters  anywhere  for  us, 
and  as  we,  with  our  English  appearance, 
threaded  through  the  army,  looking  for 
rooms,  the  looks  and  gestures  became 
even  more  hostile.  We  passed  a  battery 


64      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

of  artillery.  They  stopped  us.  In  con- 
cert, they  poured  out  a  flood  of  German, 
accompanied  by  the  waving  of  clubbed 
muskets,  to  show  what  they  had  done 
to  the  English.  A  packet  of  cigarettes 
appeased  them. 

It  was  getting  on  toward  eight  o'clock, 
and  a  proclamation  from  that  eternal 
German  printing-press  informed  us  that 
all  Mons  must  be  indoors  by  eight.  Down 
by  the  rusting,  disused  railway,  we  found 
at  last  a  hostess  with  the  courage  to  let 
us  in.  Two  young  German  officers,  she 
informed  us,  were  quartered  in  her  house. 
We  saw  them  at  dinner.  As  a  wise 
precaution  we  showed  them  our  papers 
and  explained  who  we  were.  They  looked 
over  the  papers,  said  a  few  formally  polite 
words  and  fell  to  the  business  of  getting 
out  reports  while  they  ate. 

The  German  army  had  struck  the  enemy; 
it  had  seen  its  dead.  Under  a  discipline 
no  longer  inhumanly  machine-like,  but 
dark  and  grim,  it  was  rolling  on  toward 
Death,  or  Paris. 

The  time  had  come  for  four  of  us  to 
leave  Belgium  ;  we  were  going  back  to 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      65 

Aix-la-Chapelle  in  Germany  by  a  returning 
troop  train  ;  thence  into  the  neutral  terri- 
tory of  Holland. 

Brussels,  when  we  left  it,  was  intact 
but  hopeless — a  city  running  quarter- speed. 
All  industry,  except  for  a  little  retail 
buying,  had  stopped.  There  was  no  milk 
for  your  morning  coffee,  and  eggs  were 
growing  scarce.  Our  hotel  kept  service 
running  as  usual,  with  two  companies  of 
German  soldiers  quartered  in  the  lobby. 
In  an  anteroom  off  this  lobby,  once  a  kind 
of  ladies'  parlour,  a  detail  of  the  Red 
Cross,  whose  business  it  was  to  care  for 
the  feet  of  the  soldiers,  bandaged  and 
soaked  and  patched. 

The  inhabitants  merely  stayed  indoors, 
watching  behind  closed  shutters,  or 
roamed  the  streets  aimlessly.  There 
were  no  newspapers  ;  there  was  no  news 
at  all,  except  the  announcement  that 
Namur  had  fallen,  posted  by  the  Germans 
at  all  the  cross  ways.  Crowds  would  drift 
back  and  forth,  following  aimless  impulses, 
like  the  flocks  of  newly-released  pigeons 
which  I  had  seen  a  few  days  before,  over 
the  barren  fields  by  Mons. 

F 


66      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

The  German  garrison  had  settled  down 
on  the  city  temporarily ;  and  having 
found  place  and  quarters,  they  began  to 
display  a  little  of  their  human  quality 
to  such  of  the  conquered  as  would  have 
commerce  with  them.  I  saw  a  detail 
sitting  on  a  bench  before  a  bar  trying  to 
flirt,  in  heavy  French,  with  three  Belgian 
girls,  whose  lips  laughed  at  the  jokes, 
while  their  eyes  looked  defiance.  I  saw 
a  soldier  leading  a  stray  baby  home,  and 
comforting  him  as  he  walked.  Here  and 
there,  a  soldier  off  duty  would  converse 
with  a  knot  of  people,  giving  them  in 
French,  or  through  an  interpreter,  such 
news  as  he  had. 

On  the  night  before  we  left  we  visited 
at  the  house  of  an  American  who  was 
standing  his  ground,  when  a  Belgian 
entered. 

"  You  knew  Lou  vain,  didn't  you  ?  ':  he 
said,  in  that  even,  dead  tone  with  which 
people  break  bad  news.  "  It's  gone- 
destroyed,  burned — 6cras£" — he  burst 
out  on  that  word.  Then  he  told  the  story 
as  he  had  heard  it  from  the  Germans. 
A  son  of  one  of  the  hostages  had  shot 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      67 

the  German  commander.  It  had  been  a 
signal  for  firing  from  the  roofs.  And  the 
rest  had  happened  as  a  matter  of  course. 

"  La  belle  Louvain  !  "  he  finished.  All 
the  mourning  of  Belgium  was  in  his  voice. 

"  You'll  see  it  to-morrow,"  he  added. 

At  the  Brussels  station  we  waited  from 
early  morning  until  late  afternoon.  The 
Germans  had  restored  traffic  on  this  one 
line,  to  forward  troops. 

When  I  came  into  the  Brussels  station 
on  the  day  before  the  Germans  arrived 
in  force,  it  was  neat  with  perfect  Belgian 
neatness,  orderly,  with  a  perfect  Belgian 
order.  Now  infantry  regiments  rested 
in  the  straw  along  the  platforms.  A 
battery  of  artillery  occupied  the  central 
platform.  In  one  corner,  a  cook  in  his 
undershirt  was  dealing  dinner  into  the 
mess  cans. 

Because  we  were  going  back  to  Germany, 
the  troops  were  all  smiles  and  cordiality ; 
first  toward  their  countrymen  on  the 
further  platforms,  and  then  toward  us. 
Though  we  understood  no  German,  and 
made  it  plain,  they  crowded  round  us, 
insisting  on  conversation. 

F2 


68      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

Presently,  we  found  the  linguists  among 
them.  One  had  been  a  waiter  in  New 
York.  He  was  going  back  after  the  war. 
Would  we  go  to  Hamburg  ?  Because  he 
had  a  mother  in  Hamburg. 

There  came  then  a  straight,  tall  fellow, 
a  corporal  with  a  fine  face.  He  had 
relatives  in  San  Francisco,  people  of  whom 
I  know.  Would  I  write  when  I  went 
back,  to  say  that  I  had  seen  him  ?  He  had 
intended  to  go  to  the  Exposition. 

There  was  still  another,  an  officer, 
punctilious  but  very  cordial.  He  had 
"  finished  "  at  Oxford,  and  got  there  his 
perfectly  idiomatic  English.  His  best 
English  friend  was  a  tutor  at  Oxford. 
Would  we  take  the  address  ?  And  when 
we  got  out,  would  we  send  him  a  note  ? 
"  To  say  that  I'm  here  and  well,"  said 
the  Herr  Officer. 

Yet,  a  moment  later,  when  we  asked 
him  what  Germany  was  going  to  do  with 
Belgium,  he  said  : 

"  Keep  it,  I  suppose — then  we'll  be 
near  England,  and  you'll  see  what  we'll 
do  to  that  horrible  country  !  ': 

When  the   train   started   at   last,   fifty 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      69 

soldiers  scrambled  for  the  honour  of  carry- 
ing our  bags.  They  refused  tips.  An 
excited  little  private  came  along,  waving 
a  bottle  of  port.  He  threw  it  into  the 
window  of  our  compartment,  and  stood 
bowing  with  his  hat  off.  When  we 
finally  gathered  speed,  the  whole  station 
rose  up  and  cheered  us  madly. 

It  was  sunset  when  we  began  to  get 
the  heavy  odour  of  smoke  ;  and  now  we 
had  come  over  a  hill — to  a  sight  of 
Lou  vain. 

They  had  told  us  the  truth  ;  it  was  a 
city  of  desolation. 

That  part  of  the  town  which  lay  nearest 
had  been  burned  the  day  before ;  the 
smoke  lingered,  but  the  fires  were  down. 
In  the  foreground  a  glass  factory  still 
stood.  Behind  it  were  rows  on  rows  of 
houses,  so  orderly,  so  well  arranged  that 
we  did  not  realise  we  were  seeing  a  dis- 
mantled city  until  we  noticed  that  the 
windows  gaped  empty,  and  all  the  roofs 
were  gone.  We  strained  our  eyes  toward 
the  great  Hotel  de  Ville,  the  pride  of 
Louvain.  It  stood,  rising  stark  and 
severely  beautiful,  in  the  desolation,  all 


70      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

its  six  steeples  intact.  Beside  it  rose 
majestically  four  ruined  walls,  all  that 
was  left  'of  old  St.  Pierre's,  that  irregular, 
human  Gothic  church  which  had  been 
gathering  beauty  for  six  centuries. 

The  Germans  had  spared  the  station, 
so  necessary  to  their  business.  They 
had  even  managed,  in  the  systematic 
destruction  of  a  town,  to  save  both 
electric  plant  and  electric  wires,  for  as  we 
sat  there  the  arc  lights  came  on  overhead. 

A  private  thrust  his  head  into  our 
window ;  we  talked  no  German,  but  he 
yelled  and  babbled  on  and  on.  From  the 
distance  came  regular  explosions.  He 
waved  his  hand  in  the  direction  of  the 
sound  ;  he  made  pantomime  of  shooting, 
cutting,  thrusting  with  a  bayonet.  There 
was  no  liquor  on  his  breath ;  but  he 
reeled  and  waved  in  all  his  movements. 
A  detail  strung  along  the  station-railing 
took  up  the  conversation.  And  all  gave 
play  to  those  same  exaggerated  gestures, 
as  of  drunken  men. 

Through  the  main  archway  of  the 
station,  as  shadows  in  the  half-light,  we 
could  see  soldiers  ;  we  could  see  a  troop 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      71 

of  men  in  white  shirts,  showing  by  their 
attitude  that  their  arms  were  bound 
behind  them.  Three  shadowy  figures  rose 
high  above  the  rest  on  the  pedestal  of 
the  statue  of  the  "  Liberator  of  Louvain  "  ; 
we  heard,  in  intervals  of  the  babble,  a 
voice  either  reading  or  chanting.  We  got 
this  scene  in  a  half-light  of  whites  and 
blacks  and  greys,  like  a  Whistler  etching. 
In  its  very  dimness,  its  suggestion  of 
mystery,  lay  half  its  horror. 

A  detail  of  cooks  brought  up  a  sleek 
Holstein  heifer  to  the  entrance  of  the  arch. 
My  mind  on  the  greater  event,  I  wondered 
dimly  what  they  were  doing,  until  a 
soldier,  with  one  bayonet  thrust,  dropped 
her  dead.  They  turned  the  carcass  over ; 
they  fell  to  skinning  it,  to  cutting  it  up. 
All  through  the  rest  of  that  chanting, 
that  babble  of  the  soldiers,  sounded  the 
blows  of  the  meat  axe. 

A  Hollander,  white  about  the  lips,  trans- 
lated from  the  babbling  of  the  soldiery. 

"  Those  up  there  are  men  who  are  to 
die,"  he  said,  "  the  rest  are  the  men  who 
have  been  caught  in  the  town.  They  are 
watching  for  an  example." 


72      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

We  saw  the  three  dark  figures  descend  ; 
we  saw  the  white  splashes,  which  were  the 
captives,  file  away.  We  saw  a  dark  line 
of  soldiers  follow.  I  cannot  say  for  sure, 
because  there  were  many  sounds,  but  I 
believe  that  I  heard,  just  afterward,  the 
sound  of  volleys. 

The  engine  came.  And  at  last,  we 
pulled  out  of  Lou  vain. 

The  train  shot  into  a  cutting ;  and  after 
that  was  no  more  of  Louvain  but  smoke. 

It  was  in  Holland,  two  days  later,  that 
I  saw  the  tiny,  significant  thing  which 
was  to  bind  up  all  my  recollections  of 
Belgium,  of  the  German  occupation  of 
Louvain.  I  had  stopped  at  a  post-office 
to  send  a  cablegram.  On  the  wall  hung 
a  poster,  done  with  the  art  which  the 
European  puts  into  his  posters — a  thin, 
anaemic  child,  an  anxious  mother,  a  kindly 
physician,  and  a  lettered  appeal  for  the 
International  Society  for  the  Prevention 
of  Tuberculosis.  I  remember,  then,  that 
all  through  the  half-ruined  towns  of 
Belgium  I  had  been  seeing  this  poster 
with  eyes  that  saw  not  until  now. 

The  world  had  been  transformed  in  a 


THE  WRECKAGE  OF  WAR      73 

month ;  the  currents  were  all  running 
backward.  In  that  incredibly  remote 
period  a  month  before,  we  had  just  bent 
all  the  fine  strivings  of  humanity  to  the 
saving,  the  bettering,  of  life.  For  this 
purpose,  the  abler  and  finer  spirits  of  the 
age  had  been  peering  through  microscopes, 
combining  and  recombining  the  elements 
of  nature — to  make  life,  while  it  lasted, 
more  endurable,  to  check  human  waste, 
to  bring  a  new  kingdom  of  the  spirit  to 
the  earth.  To  that  end  had  Faraday 
laboured,  and  Ehrlich  and  Metchnikoff, 
and  those  others  more  obscure,  whose 
work  flowered  in  the  achievements  of  these 
giants.  We  were  going  further  ;  we  were 
beginning  to  see  what  we  could  do  to 
co-ordinate  all  men's  efforts  for  all  men's 
good.  We  were  trying  to  curb  man's 
selfishness,  that  there  might  be  in  the 
world  fewer  hungry  mouths,  fewer  lives 
blighted  in  the  beginning.  And  now — an 
epidemic  worse  than  tuberculosis  had 
swept  over  the  world. 

And  I  thought  that  Odin  sat  enthroned 
in  the  seat  of  Christ. 


Ill 

THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR 
October,  1914 

THE  continental  European  peoples  of 
this  generation  have  been  educated  to  the 
tradition  of  war,  either  as  a  virtue  or  a 
necessity.  We  Americans,  reared  in  a 
generation  of  peace,  a  generation  wherein 
we  have  found  it  unnecessary  even  to 
prepare  for  national  defence,  have  observed 
with  a  kind  of  vague  interest,  even  of 
amusement,  that  martial  spirit  of  Europe. 
Through  all  the  pretty,  graceful  life  of 
France,  of  Germany,  of  Austria,  even  of 
England,  it  has  run  like  a  scarlet  thread  in 
the  web.  We,  as  pilgrims  and  tourists, 
have  thrilled  a  little  at  the  pomp  and 
parade  of  it — the  royal  receptions  on  the 
Champs  Elysdes,  with  their  line  of  ten 
thousand  cuirassiers,  the  marching  armies 
at  German  reviews,  the  Italian  bersaglieri 

T4 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR    75 

hurrying  in  their  route-step  through  the 
dust.  We  have  refused  in  our  souls  to 
recognise  the  end  and  aim  of  all  these 
burnished  accoutrements  and  tossing 
plumes. 

Occasionally,  too,  in  our  communica- 
tions with  our  fellow  men  of  Europe,  or  at 
least  the  able  and  enlightened  among  them, 
we  have  encountered  that  war  spirit,  that 
sense  of  the  sanctity  in  slaughter,  lying 
like  a  dangerous  reef  in  the  quiet  current 
of  their  thoughts,  and  have  been  astonished 
to  find  in  them  a  set  of  beliefs  as  foreign 
to  our  own  as  are  the  philosophical  specu- 
lations of  the  Chinese.  Pin  them  down  to 
the  basis  of  their  opinions  and  you  dis- 
covered, besides  a  few  more  or  less  vague 
national  ambitions  or  national  resentments, 
a  philosophy  which  struck  the  American 
as  harsh  and  curious.  War,  they  said,  was 
necessary  and  right  because  of  its  inherent 
nobility.  It  strengthened  national  char- 
acter. It  '  purged  nations."  In  peace 
men  grew  soft ;  in  war,  hard  but  pure. 
The  Germans,  as  might  be  expected,  were 
the  chief  exponents  of  this  philosophy  ;  I 
take  it  that  the  average  Frenchman  had 


76      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

by  now  grown  ready  to  forget  Alsace- 
Lorraine,  ready  to  accept  the  reign  of 
peace  if  his  neighbours  would  leave  him 
alone.  Yet  I  have  heard  it  from  French- 
men and  even  from  Englishmen  :  "  The 
purging  of  nations  ;  the  glorious  life  !  " — 
those  were  the  catchwords. 

It  was  perfectly  undemocratic ;  that 
was  the  feature  of  this  philosophy  which 
struck  the  naked-eye  American  observer  in 
that  remote  period  of  the  world  which 
ended  in  catastrophe  in  August,  1914. 
The  strongest,  the  most  hardened  advo- 
cates of  this  philosophy  admitted,  when 
pinned  down,  that  a  plebiscite  of  the 
European  peoples  would  always  be  against 
any  aggressive  war ;  that  the  common 
man,  who  has  most  to  lose,  would  never 
sacrifice  himself,  his  sons  and  his  means 
of  subsistence  for  anything  short  of  des- 
perate national  defence.  But  these  advo- 
cates of  the  "  purging  of  blood  "  theory 
held  somehow  a  vague  belief  that  a  nation 
is  greater  than  its  parts  ;  that  the  welfare 
and  glory  of  Germany  or  France  or  Russia 
or  even  of  England  was  a  nobler  con- 
sideration than  the  welfare  and  happiness 


of  all  the  individual  Germans  or  Frenchmen 
or  Russians.  To  us,  who  had  never  spent 
two  or  three  years  of  our  lives  under 
military  discipline,  with  the  mental  train- 
ing which  military  discipline  implies,  had 
never  accustomed  ourselves  to  a  recognised 
caste  system,  these  ideas  seemed,  somehow, 
like  Hindu  philosophy — a  thing  beyond  our 
mental  apparatus,  a  room  to  which  we  had 
no  key. 

Yes,  the  European  blow-up  would  come 
some  time,  said  a  few  of  our  travellers  and 
observers.  Most  of  us,  however,  simply 
refused  to  entertain  the  thought.  That 
anything  so  beautiful  as  most  of  Europe, 
so  advanced  in  the  arts  of  living,  so  far 
progressed  in  the  devices  of  social  order, 
should  destroy  by  a  stroke  of  the  sword 
that  beauty,  that  comfort,  that  order — 
it  was  one  of  those  unthinkable  thoughts. 
Mankind  would  muddle  through  somehow. 
The  weight  of  armaments  was,  of  course, 
a  grievously  hard  thing,  economically 
speaking.  But  perhaps  those  very  arma- 
ments would  pay  for  themselves  by  secur- 
ing peace. 

And   then — it   came — violently,    univer- 


78      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

sally,  malignantly.  As  I  write,  it  has  gone 
on  for  two  months ;  and  even  our  vision 
of  a  quick  war,  the  one  blessing  we  thought 
we  perceived  in  the  beginning,  is  shattered. 
If  we  can  prophesy  anything  it  is  that  this 
war  must  drag  on  until  somebody  is  ex- 
hausted. But  already  it  has  gone  so  far 
that  the  American  observer,  seeing  it  all 
externally,  may  realise  what  modern  war 
is,  and  how  the  reality  squares  with  that 
ideal  of  "  purging  nations." 

Let  me  begin  with  the  outward  and 
obvious  manifestation  of  war,  the  fighting. 
In  some  old  history  book  I  remember 
this  line  concerning  Grant's  operations  in 
the  Wilderness  campaign :  "  There  was 
none  of  the  pomp  and  parade  of  war  ;  only 
its  horrible  butchery."  Those  glorious, 
dashing  cavalry  charges  beloved  by  the 
poets,  those  tossing  plumes  and  sounding 
brass  bands  which  lured  our  youth  to  the 
colours  in  old  days — they  are  not  visible 
along  the  Marne  or  the  Aisne.  The  mentor 
of  modern  war  is  not  your  plumed  beau 
sabreur  ;  he  is  a  cold,  exact  man  of  science 
who  butchers  by  the  book.  Your  modern 
army  is  an  orderly  arrangement  of  grey- 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR    79 

clad  or  brown-clad  men,  equipped  with  the 
last  word  in  modern  scientific  instruments 
of  carnage,  directed,  like  a  section  gang, 
by  the  whistle,  killing  or  getting  killed 
soberly,  mechanically.  Your  modern 
battle  is  not  a  day's  affair  or  a  two-days' 
affair :  an  assembly  in  the  morning,  a 
harangue  about  glory  or  the  grave,  a  few 
hours  of  hell,  a  retreat,  a  long  gathering  of 
force  and  strength  for  the  next  battle.  It 
is  solid,  continuous,  deadly  slugging,  day 
after  day,  week  after  week,  until  men  cease 
to  care  for  the  hazard  of  life  and  death 
through  sheer  exhaustion,  until  regiments 
fade  out  through  sheer  haemorrhage. 

So  it  has  been  up  to  now  ;  and  so  it  will 
continue  to  the  end.  The  true  war  corre- 
spondents of  this  struggle  are  the  soldiers 
themselves  ;  the  formal  writers  on  war  are 
observing  only  at  a  distance,  getting  only 
glimpses  of  the  fighting,  and  those  by 
accident.  It  is  the  soldiers'  letters  home 
as  printed  in  the  English,  French,  German, 
and  Belgian  newspapers,  which  give  the 
human  story.  And  these  brave,  illusioned, 
worn-out  boys  record  not  the  glories  of  the 
charge,  but  the  fatigues  between  assaults, 


80      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

the  price  by  which  they  gain  a  half-mile 
of  ground,  and  the  terrible  sights  at  the 
end.  I  shall  not  drive  this  home  by 
example  ;  that  way  madness  lies. 

Yet,  after  all,  as  one  of  the  complaisant 
protagonists  of  warfare  has  pointed  out, 
war  does  not  consist  wholly  of  slaughter 
and  of  the  piled-up  dead.  It  is  a  series  of 
moves  and  acts,  from  the  commencement 
of  hostilities  to  the  conclusion  of  peace. 
The  slaughter  in  the  trenches  is  only  one 
aspect  of  it.  War  must  be  treated  as  a 
whole.  Let  me  take  him  at  his  word,  and 
consider — in  so  far  as  any  one  man  can 
now  consider — the  state  of  Europe  at  the 
beginning  of  October,  1914. 

In  all  of  central  Europe,  as  America 
knows  by  now,  the  young  men,  the  men 
capable  of  playing  a  vigorous  part  in 
anything,  are  all  at  the  Front ;  in  England 
alone  is  there  youth  at  home  or  on  the 
streets.  Production,  the  business  of  feed- 
ing, clothing,  and  sheltering  the  world,  of 
providing  its  comforts  and  refinements, 
has  virtually  ceased ;  and  the  chief  end 
of  such  manufacture  as  remains  is  the 
production  of  war  materials.  We  speak 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR    81 

of  war  as  destructive,  and  we  think,  when 
we  speak,  of  burned  towns,  blown-up 
bridges,  wrecked  railroads.  We  do  not 
take  into  account,  at  first,  the  toll  of 
factories,  and  workshops  which  lie  rusting — 
the  waste  of  idleness. 

Perhaps  of  all  central  Europe,  Germany 
has  least  felt  the  wastage  of  this  war  ;  for, 
except  in  east  Prussia,  she  has  so  far  been 
uninvaded.  Yet  from  end  to  end  of 
Germany  most  factory  doors  are  closed  and 
the  machinery  stands  immovable  in  grease, 
because  the  men  are  gone  to  war.  From 
Aix  to  the  Polish  border,  she  is  virtually 
producing  nothing  except  the  eternal  war 
materials — which  are  waste  because  their 
end  is  wastage — and  the  necessities  which 
the  stay-at-homes  must  have  even  in  war 
time.  Distribution  has  been  pared  to  a 
minimum  ;  the  Government  has  been  able 
to  dispense  with  only  enough  railroad  men 
to  satisfy  the  most  pressing  needs.  Of 
course,  the  fine  side  of  life,  the  sportive 
side,  has  gone  by  the  board,  though  the 
cafes  and  plays  and  cinema  shows  are  still 
running,  I  believe,  in  Berlin  and  the  other 
larger  centres.  A  border  city  like  Aix 

o 


82       MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

furnishes  such  a  spectacle  as  history  never 
saw  before.  One  or  two  hotels  are  running 
half-force.  Their  cooks  and  waiters  are 
all  old  men.  The  rest  are  closed.  Half 
the  shops  are  closed.  On  the  streets  you 
see  no  young  men,  save  a  policeman  or  a 
uniformed  railroad  official  here  and  there. 
A  few  cabs  hang  round  the  station  ;  they 
are  manned  by  bent,  grey-haired  drivers. 
Down  the  streets  files  an  eternal  procession 
of  women,  carrying  bundles  home  from 
shop  or  market  because  there  is  no  delivery. 
And  Germany,  I  repeat,  has  perhaps  felt 
the  shock  least  of  any  Continental  nation, 
because  she  has  not  been  invaded  and 
because  she  has  prepared,  with  all  her 
thoroughness,  for  this  very  event. 

Add  to  this  check  of  the  industrial 
wheels  a  deal  of  active  misery,  and  you 
have  Belgium  and  northern  France.  In 
Belgium,  production  stopped  when  the 
Germans  came ;  poor  Belgium,  which 
before  the  war  was  one  of  the  busiest 
workshops  of  the  world,  is  down  to  the 
merest  hand-to-mouth  retail  trade.  Beyond 
all  that  she  has  suffered  an  enormous 
visible  and  immediate  loss  of  property 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR     83 

from  the  destruction  of  her  villages,  her 
roads,  her  bridges,  her  railways ;  the 
refugees,  out  of  money,  out  of  supplies,  out 
of  work,  have  crowded  into  the  towns, 
there  to  live  on  what  charity,  what  public 
support,  they  may  find.  The  Belgians  are 
coming  up  handsomely  ;  but  the  problem 
is  nearly  unsolvable.  Invaded  and  shut 
off,  they  have  no  imports.  There  was  only 
half  a  harvest  this  year.  The  invaders 
commandeered  all  ready  supplies  whole- 
sale. These  supplies,  it  is  true,  have  been 
paid  for  with  orders  on  the  German 
Government  or  on  the  Bank  of  Paris ; 
but  an  order  on  the  treasury  is  one  thing, 
and  food  is  quite  another.  Already,  the 
tin  cup  of  the  newly-made  beggar  is  rattling 
everywhere  in  Belgium — and  it  is  only 
October  when  I  write. 

Intensify  the  state  of  Belgium,  and  you 
have  the  condition  of  northern  France — 
fair  little  northern  France,  the  most 
gracious  country,  but  yesterday,  in  all 
Europe.  The  armies  have  trampled  it 
back  and  forth  this  month  long  ;  where 
the  Belgian  villages  were  merely  burned, 
northern  France  has  been  ruined  by  shell 

G2 


84      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

and  shrapnel  and  rifle  volley.  The  more 
timid — perhaps  the  more  prudent — have 
streamed  out  to  increase  the  misery  of 
villages  farther  from  the  line  of  advance. 
The  remainder  are  living  in  huts  and 
cellars,  under  the  shell  fire.  We  shall 
never  know  until  the  war  is  over,  scarcely 
even  then,  how  many  non-combatants  have 
died  of  battle  as  a  matter  of  "  military 
necessity."  For  just  as  there  was  never 
so  large  a  war  before,  so  there  never  were 
battles  before  in  a  country  so  thickly 
inhabited.  That  the  non  -  combatants 
should  wholly  escape  were  impossible. 

The  rest  of  France,  again,  is  like  Germany 
— only  more  so.  Having  a  smaller  popu- 
lation, she  has  made  greater  drafts  on  her 
vigorous  men.  She  has  been  able  to  spare 
for  industry  only  those  who  make  the 
eternal  war  materials.  The  silk  factories 
of  Lyons,  the  steel  factories  of  Clermont, 
except  in  so  far  as  they  make  military 
supplies,  are  rusting.  The  lace-makers 
have  rested  from  their  bobbins ;  they  are 
needed  in  the  fields  to  gather  the  crops 
which  the  men  left. 

Life,  with  the  women,  the  children,  the 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR    85 

old  men,  is  down  to  primitive  food,  primi- 
tive shelter,  and  primitive  warmth.  Lux- 
uries are  no  more,  or  they  have  been  sent 
to  the  army.  Even  the  necessities  are 
being  skimped — for  the  army,  always  the 
army.  The  army  needs  blankets ;  the 
women  and  children  of  frugal,  close-living 
France  will  sleep  cold  this  winter.  The 
army  needs  flannels ;  the  women  and 
children  of  France  will  walk  cold  this 
winter.  They  are  even  splitting  their 
pillows  to  send  those  comforts  to  the 
hospitals.  And  in  France,  as  in  Belgium, 
the  winter  of  national  hardship  is  but  just 
begun. 

And  though  by  some  miracle  there  were 
men  enough  in  France  and  Germany  to 
provide  these  giant  armies  and  also  keep 
the  factories  going,  production  in  much  of 
Europe  would  still  be  running  to  a  vanish- 
ing-point, owing  to  a  factor  which  no  one, 
except  possibly  the  Germans,  considered 
much  before  the  war.  I  refer  to  the 
intense  intercommunication  of  nations. 
While  the  official  classes  of  Europe  have 
bickered  and  intrigued,  have  planned  wars 
and  averted  wars,  have  built  up  their 


86      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

incredible  armaments  toward  this  very 
crisis,  the  people  have  unconsciously  been 
working  toward  that  dream  of  the  al- 
truist, the  United  States  of  Europe.  Com- 
merce has  grown  ;  intercommunication  has 
grown  ;  the  internationalist,  holding  alle- 
giance to  one  country,  having  residence  in 
all,  has  increased  from  a  "  specimen  "  to 
an  absolute  type.  Above  all,  what  might 
be  called  the  interchange  of  processes  is 
enormous.  This  suit  that  I  am  wearing 
was  woven,  I  believe,  in  England.  But 
its  dyes  came  from  Germany  and  its 
linings  from  France ;  its  buttons  were 
turned  in  America,  and  its  thread  was 
spun  in  Scotland.  And  that  is  only  a 
simple  and  primitive  example.  Any  manu- 
facturer can  multiply  examples  from  his 
own  factory. 

And  for  this  aspect  in  the  wastage  of 
war,  England  is  the  exemplar — England 
who  still  has  young  men  on  the  streets,  still 
runs  automobiles,  still  keeps  theatres  and 
cafes  open,  and  still,  above  all,  maintains 
her  overseas  traffic. 

England,  I  think,  began  fully  to  appre- 
ciate this  intercommunication  of  nations  at 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR     87 

that  day,  after  the  outbreak  of  the  war, 
when  she  had  closed  her  Stock  Exchange, 
ordered  her  moratorium,  and  prepared  to 
face  her  hardest  struggle.  Up  to  that  time, 
no  statistician,  and  scarcely  an  economist, 
had  taken  full  stock  of  the  enormous  part 
played  in  the  world's  commerce,  and 
especially  in  England's  commerce,  by 
'  bills  of  exchange."  I  mean  just  this  : 
The  man  who  mines  and  ships  a  load  of 
coal  at  the  colliery  mouth,  gets  a  bill  of 
lading  which  becomes  money.  The  bank, 
to  all  intents  and  purposes,  in  normal 
times,  discounts  it ;  and  business  proceeds. 
Now  this  "  paper,"  in  the  case  of  England, 
came  from  all  over  the  world,  from  in- 
imical Germany  and  Austria  and  isolated 
Russia  as  well  as  from  the  English  colonies 
and  neutral  America.  The  banks  stopped 
discounting  it  as  soon  as  the  war  broke  out, 
and  commerce  halted,  for  the  time  being, 
as  short  as  though  all  the  money  in  the 
world  had  been  withdrawn  from  circulation. 
The  Government  announced  that  it  would 
liquidate  this  paper  up  to  two  hundred 
million  pounds.  It  began  payment,  and 
it  stopped  short  because  a  billion  dollars 


88      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

would  not  nearly  meet  the  emergency. 
I  am  not  writing  of  the  state  of  British 
finance  ;  that  is  a  story  by  itself.  But 
I  mention  this  situation  as  an  example 
of  the  wide  intercommunication  between 
nation  and  nation. 

England  pulled  herself  together,  of 
course  ;  and  with  the  seas  open,  she  began 
to  resume  commerce,  in  some  fashion, 
with  her  colonies  and  the  neutral  nations. 
Manufacture  went  on,  hectically  in  some 
lines  which  have  intimately  to  do  with 
the  war,  such  as  cloth  and  blanket  weav- 
ing, and  slackly  in  others.  Whereupon,  a 
new  exemplar  arose. 

In  the  most  unexpected,  the  most  per- 
plexing fashion,  the  manufacturers  of 
England  found  themselves  hampered  by 
the  need  of  certain  materials  for  which 
they  had  formerly  counted  on  the  Conti- 
nent. To  mention  a  small  example  :  Great 
Britain  had  imported  all  her  safety  lamps 
for  coal  mining— part  from  Austria,  part 
from  Belgium.  Austria  and  Belgium  are 
both  non-productive  and  shut  off  from 
England  ;  as  the  supply  of  lamps  breaks 
up,  the  English  must  find  some  way  of 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR    89 

manufacturing  them  at  home.  Again, 
England  has  looked  mainly  to  Germany  for 
her  supply  of  carbons  for  electric  lamps. 
Such  carbons  as  she  manufactures  now 
will  only  supply  the  Government  demand 
for  searchlights.  So  she  must  expand  at 
all  costs  her  carbon  factories. 

Indeed,  those  industries  which  make  use 
of  chemicals  in  their  processes  are  the 
trades  which  best  illustrate  this  process. 
Germany,  with  her  talent  for  the  exact 
sciences,  has  nearly  taken  chemical  manu- 
facture unto  herself.  In  certain  lines,  she 
has  a  monopoly.  And  the  lack  of  these 
.chemicals  manifests  itself  in  the  most 
curious  ways.  Cyanide  is  necessary  to 
the  reduction  of  low-grade  gold  ores.  Gold 
reduction  all  over  the  empire  is  bound  to 
languish  until  the  English  find  a  way  of 
making  cyanide — for  that  branch  of  chem- 
istry has  been  solely  in  German  hands. 

The  chemicals  which  put  the  finish  on 
certain  special  qualities  of  metal  all  came 
from  Germany ;  here  again  the  English 
must  find  a  way.  The  Germans  have  made 
most  of  the  aniline  dyes  ;  and  these  dyes 
enter  into  a  score  of  English  manufacturing 


90      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

processes ;  English  chemists  must  set 
themselves  to  learn  dye-making.  And 
most  of  these  new  industries  can  be  merely 
temporary,  since  the  Germans  have  ruled 
in  the  chemical  trades  because  of  native 
adaptability  and  natural  resources  ;  when 
the  war  is  over  they  will  doubtless  continue 
to  make  the  best  and  cheapest  chemicals, 
just  as  the  English  will  continue  to  weave 
the  best  woollen  fabrics. 

In  the  Napoleonic  wars — which  furnish 
the  only  parallel  for  this  crisis — England 
felt  at  first  only  the  loss  of  her  commerce, 
a  loss  which  she  regained  as  the  struggle 
went  on.  In  production,  she  was  almost, 
if  not  quite,  self-sufficient.  The  United 
States  of  Europe,  the  commercial  solidi- 
fication of  the  world,  had  scarcely  begun. 
The  Pan-European  War  of  1914  found 
the  movement  well  on  its  way.  And  I 
mention  this  present  perplexity  of  England 
as  a  new  waste  and  a  new  burden  of  war. 

So  much  for  the  present  physical  state 
of  Europe,  as  nearly  as  any  one  observer 
can  see  it  in  these  newsless,  shut-in  times, 
when  observation  is  limited  to  what  little 
of  countries  the  armies  and  the  censors 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR     91 

permit  one  to  see,  and  information  from 
the  closed  countries  proceeds  by  the 
mouth-to-ear  conversation  of  released 
Americans.  And  now  for  the  mental  state  : 

I  was  not  long  in  Europe  before  I  realised 
that  I  was  living  amid  mental  and  psychic 
abnormality  ;  that  the  soul  of  the  world 
had  changed  more  than  the  face  of  the 
world.  Once  perceived,  this,  I  think,  has 
become  a  greater  dread  to  me  than 
carnage  and  destruction  and  active  grief. 
In  six  weeks  I  have  scarcely  heard,  either 
on  the  high  seas  which  carry  in  and  out  of 
Europe,  or  on  the  solid  land,  a  genuine, 
natural  laugh.  The  lines  of  the  faces  run 
downward  ;  people  tend  to  move  by  jerks  ; 
conversation  goes  back  always,  inevitably, 
to  the  war — the  chances  of  this  nation  or 
that,  the  settlement  if  "  we "  win,  the 
reckoning  if  "  we  "  lose. 

Already,  scarcely  one  man  or  woman  in 
Europe  but  has  felt  a  near  or  remote  grief 
for  someone  who  was.  I,  the  alien,  met 
on  the  steamer,  going  over,  a  pleasant 
little  Frenchman,  full  of  intelligent  con- 
versation and  good  stories.  A  friend 
came  in  from  Paris  yesterday.  "  By  the 


92      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

way,"  he  said,  "  Gorot's  dead — killed  at 
Soissons."  On  that  same  boat  was  an 
English  officer,  a  zealous  player  of  deck 
games.  Yesterday  his  face  shone  out 
on  me  from  an  illustrated  weekly  news- 
paper with  the  legend,  "  Killed  in 
action."  I  owe  gratitude  to  a  German 
officer  whom  I  met  in  Belgium.  I  hear 
from  Brussels  that  he  is  dead.  All  this 
in  my  short,  superficial  acquaintance- 
how  much  more  in  the  acquaintance  of 
any  European !  In  denuded  France,  in 
sobered  Germany,  the  women  are  streaming 
daily  to  the  Biirgermeister  or  the  Maire 
to  get  the  lists — when  the  Government 
gives  them  out.  Those  who  have  seen 
these  spectacles  tell  me  that  there  is 
little  weeping  when  the  news  comes  ;  only 
this  woman  or  that  covers  her  face  with 
her  shawl  and  goes  home.  They  live  in 
the  attitude  of  expecting  the  worst. 

Under  this  whole  nervous  state,  this 
repressed  hysteria,  lies  fear,  nobly  or 
ignobly  borne,  according  to  the  individual 
character.  Even  Germany,  who,  if  we 
are  to  believe  the  gossip,  is  bearing  herself 
with  such  savage  fortitude,  gallantry  and 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR     93 

confidence,  must  feel  this  sense  of  fear ; 
for  Germans  and  Frenchmen  and  English- 
men are  made  of  the  same  elements,  with 
a  slightly  different  mixture  and  finish. 
If  her  army  gives  way  on  the  western 
border,  Germany  sees  devastation — the 
same  devastation  that  has  blighted  north- 
ern France.  If  her  army  gives  way  on 
the  eastern  border,  she  sees — the  Cossacks. 
France  knows  that  defeat  on  the  Marne 
means  all  France  made  like  northern 
France.  By  night,  darkened  London  looks 
up  into  the  skies,  where  the  searchlights 
keep  watch  of  brassy  heavens,  and  thinks 
on  fleets  of  Zeppelins.  And  all  these 
peoples,  as  they  measure  their  food,  think 
on  starvation. 

This  fear  in  the  ignoble  takes  the  form 
of  malice,  hatred  and  all  uncharitableness. 
It  is  the  basis  of  the  threats  among  the 
German  people  against  England — "  sordid, 
hypocritical  England  " — who  is  fighting  not 
for  them  but  against  them.  It  shows 
itself  in  the  wholesale  acceptance  of 
rumours  concerning  atrocities.  It  inspires 
gross  caricatures  of  the  traits,  the  customs, 
and  the  morals  of  hostile  peoples.  It 


94       MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

breaks  out  in  vitriolic  attacks  on  persons 
and  personalities.  It  is  part,  in  short,  of 
the  "  purification  by  war  !  " 

The  purification  by  war !  It  seems 
scarcely  worth  while  for  an  American 
to  refute  that  doctrine,  so  far  from  most 
of  our  ideals.  Yet  it  is  the  doctrine  whose 
continuance  in  Europe  has  made  possible 
this  calamity  of  the  nations — it  is  the 
philosophical  basis  of  the  whole  struggle. 
Never  was  it  so  hard  for  the  world  to  guess 
its  future  as  now  ;  but  it  is  possible  that  in 
our  generation  we  may  find  "  the  religion 
of  valour  "  cropping  out  among  us,  and 
shall  have  need  to  refute  it  by  this  great 
exemplar. 

Of  course,  war  does  call  out  the  heroic 
virtues ;  in  so  far,  the  Zabern  is  right. 
It  is  heroic  for  the  conscript,  made  a 
soldier  just  because  he  was  born  in  Ger- 
many or  France  between  1885  and  1898, 
to  walk  uncomplainingly  to  death.  It  is 
heroic  for  the  older  men,  not  called  to  the 
colours,  to  volunteer.  It  is  heroic  for  the 
shopkeeper's  assistant  of  London,  knowing 
what  goes  on  along  the  Marne  and  the 
Aisne,  to  join  the  army  that  he  may 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR     95 

preserve  the  ideal  of  empire  to  another 
man's  sons.  It  is  heroic  for  the  women  to 
let  them  go.  The  great,  quiet  charities- 
Frenchwomen  giving  their  scanty  goods 
to  clothe  the  soldiers,  Belgians  feeding 
Belgians,  gently-bred  German  women 
working  the  fields — they  are  heroic,  too. 
And  suffering  and  grief  are  in  themselves 
heroic.  He  who  has  not  suffered  lacks 
something  of  full  stature. 

However,  take  a  parallel  :  there  is  none 
in  the  world,  I  suppose,  who  would  ad- 
vocate renouncing  all  medicine,  scientific 
or  unscientific,  and  letting  cholera,  small- 
pox and  bubonic  plague  do  their  will. 
Yet  these  diseases  bring  suffering  and 
bereavement  and  grief,  with  all  the 
nobility  they  apply.  They  bring  also  the 
chance  for  heroism. 

There  was  Father  Damien  ;  there  are 
the  thousand  uncanonised  Damiens  of 
the  medical  profession. 

"  Ah,  yes,"  answers  the  purification-by- 
war  theorist,  "  but  there's  a  distinction 
between  courage  and  valour.  Ours  is  the 
religion  of  valour,  not  merely  courage." 
Valour,  as  I  understand  it,  is  merely 


96      MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

courage  plus  human  opposition — or  courage 
plus  the  sporting  spirit,  if  you  will.  And 
to  make  a  religion  out  of  the  sporting 
spirit  seems  quite  a  new  thing  in  the  world. 

He  makes  another  point,  this  advocate 
of  the  new  religion  which  has  produced 
this  conflagration  in  Europe.  The  world 
grows  self-indulgent  in  times  of  peace. 
Extravagance  beyond  moderation  or 
measure  has  become  a  rule  of  European 
life,  as  of  American  life.  It  is  good,  it  is 
ennobling,  to  paralyse  commerce  for  a 
time,  to  cut  the  world  down  to  bare 
necessities,  to  reduce  gross  stomachs  and 
flabby  hips,  to  force  people  into  giving. 
He  talks  there  much  mis-applied  sense. 
All  classes  above  the  bare  margin  of 
existence  had  been  living  too  high  and  fast. 
But  the  very  class  which  talks  this  theory 
is  the  class  which  resents  bitterly  and 
militantly  any  attempt  to  cut  down  its 
own  goods  and  luxuries  for  the  benefit 
of  the  poor  and  humble.  And  the  classes, 
whether  in  Germany,  Austria  or  Russia, 
who  forced  this  war  on  the  conscripts, 
will  not  do  the  economic  suffering ! 

And  there,  I  think,  you  come  down  to 


THE  RELIGION  OF  VALOUR     97 

the  basis  of  the  whole  "  religion  of  valour." 
It  is  essentially  aristocratic.  It  belongs 
to  the  upper  class,  divinely  endowed  with 
the  right  to  say  what  is  good  for  the  lower 
classes — whether  soft  ease  with  peace,  or 
agony  and  unease  with  war.  It  is  un- 
democratic ;  and  since  democracy,  rightly 
understood,  is  Christianity,  it  is  also  un- 
Christian. 

Is  it  a  dream  in  which  we  live  ?  Six 
months  ago,  how  strange  it  would  have 
seemed  to  me  to  be  writing  in  this  strain, 
to  be  refuting  such  doctrine  as  this  !  Yet, 
I  repeat,  it  has  suddenly  become  the 
governing  doctrine  of  Europe.  As  Islam 
burst  on  the  Middle  Ages,  this  has  burst 
on  the  modern  world.  We  ourselves,  I 
repeat,  may  have  to  reckon  with  it  before 
we  have  outlived  the  next  quarter-century. 
Let  us  hope,  even  now ;  perhaps  still  the 
laying-down  of  arms,  the  true  peace  of 
nations,  may  follow ;  perhaps  the  very 
triumph  of  the  doctrine  may  be  its  destruc- 
tion, and  Christianity,  by  whose  basic 
principles  most  of  us  have  presumed  to 
govern  our  lives,  may  rise  greater  than 
ever  out  of  these  ashes. 

H 


IV 

THE  SOUL  OF  FRANCE 
November ,  1914 

WHAT  does  it  mean  ? — this  phrase  with 
which  we  play  so  glibly — "  A  nation  in 
arms."  There  is  no  imagination  in  this 
world,  I  suppose,  so  large  and  vivid  that  it 
can  grasp  the  full  meaning  of  the  phrase  ;  it 
is  like  trying,  in  one  glimpse,  to  appreciate 
the  full  glory  of  Niagara.  But  let  us  try 
to  see  how  it  goes  in  that  nation  which, 
next  to  Belgium,  is  bearing  the  heaviest 
toll  of  this  war — France. 

To  begin  with,  one  must  remember 
certain  large  facts  :  by  the  end  of  autumn, 
every  able-bodied  man  in  France,  excepting 
only  a  few  classes  exempted  to  run  the 
railroads,  the  public  utilities,  the  coal 
mines  and  the  arms  factories,  had  gone 
with  the  colours — or  France  knew  the 
reason  why.  To  grasp  this,  put  yourself 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE        99 

in  the  place  of  the  Frenchman  or  the 
Frenchwoman,  and  look  about  you.  Take 
your  own  family,  your  own  club,  your 
own  circle  of  acquaintances,  and  subtract 
all  the  men  between  eighteen  and  forty- 
five  years  old  ;  and  imagine  the  rest. 

If  you  would  understand  the  soul  of 
France,  you  must  remember  another 
thing :  the  Republic — which  means  the 
whole  people,  not  the  military  caste — no 
more  wanted  war  than  the  United  States 
wants  war  to-day.  In  the  generation  since 
1870,  she  had  set  about  to  achieve  real 
civilisation.  Thrifty,  careful,  honourable, 
her  citizens  had  learned  the  art  of  living, 
of  getting  a  pound  of  enjoyment  from  a 
groat  of  expense.  In  her  own  peculiar 
fashion  she  had  prospered  greatly.  She 
held — at  least  until  recently — the  gold  re- 
serve of  Europe.  She  was  so  self-sufficient 
that  she  could  have  been  blockaded  at 
any  time  and  missed  no  essential  except 
cotton  and  a  little  meat.  Though  she 
had  much  plain  living,  she  had  little 
poverty ;  though,  outside  of  Paris,  she 
knew  no  flaunting  extravagance,  she  also 
knew  little  squalor.  As  the  world  ap- 

H  2 


100    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

predates,  she  was  the  home  of  all  high 
intellectual  refinement. 

What  this  generation  asked  of  the  future 
— all  it  asked — was  that  armed  Europe 
should  leave  France  alone  to  live  her  own 
life  and  have  her  own  national  career  in 
her  own  way.  For  that  purpose,  she 
maintained  an  army  which  grew  every 
year  into  a  more  distressing  burden. 
Alsace-Lorraine,  it  is  true,  rested  at  the 
bottom  of  her  thought,  a  sad,  romantic 
dream.  But  from  those  who  understand 
France,  as  I  of  course  do  not  understand 
her,  I  know  that  she  would  never  have 
spilled  the  blood  of  her  sons  to  regain 
territory.  Alsace-Lorraine  had  grown  to 
be  a  political  rally  ing- cry,  a  piece  of 
chauvinism  like  our  own  "  bloody  shirt  " 
after  the  Civil  War. 

When  the  storm  gathered ;  when,  out 
of  a  summer  of  accustomed  security,  the 
long  tension  of  Europe  broke ;  when,  on 
a  day's  notice,  son,  father  and  husband 
went  out  with  the  colours,  it  was  not  for 
Alsace-Lorraine  nor  any  other  dream  of 
national  greatness,  but  for  the  final  quiet 
of  France.  They  went,  it  is  true,  in  a 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       101 

mood  of  that  hatred  which  gives  no 
quarter.  But  their  final  aim  was  peace, 
and  not  war. 

I  think  that  even  France's  adversaries 
admit  this  in  their  hearts.  For  this  war 
you  can  blame  Germany  and  Austria  and 
Russia,  with  their  dreams  of  racial  ex- 
pansion. You  can  even  make  out  a  case 
against  England.  But  save  little  Belgium 
alone,  none  is  so  guiltless  of  these  rivers  of 
blood  as  smiling,  loyal,  practical  France. 

It  does  not  matter  that  in  the  first 
stages  of  that  grim,  prepared  Germanic 
rush  towards  Paris,  some  of  France's 
citizen  legions  broke  and  ran.  We  have 
our  own  battle  of  Bull  Run  to  show  how 
raw  civilian  levies  fear  the  guns  in  their 
first  engagement.  This  was  a  democratic 
army.  She  could  not  develop  the  stern 
tradition  of  discipline,  which  flourishes 
best  in  an  aristocracy.  The  point  is  that 
the  "  emotional  "  French,  the  "  mercurial  " 
French,  the  French  who  were  supposed 
to  be  great  in  success  and  little  in  defeat, 
rallied,  smashed  their  way  to  victory,  and 
settled  down  to  that  grim  business  of 
machine-slaughter  in  the  entrenchments 


102    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

along  the  river.  No  pomp  and  glory  in 
this  fighting,  as  in  old  battles  ;  only  the 
hard  work  of  a  day  labourer,  the  soul- 
endurance  of  a  criminal  going  to  the 
gallows. 

Behind  these  men  of  France  the  nation 
settled  down  without  emotion,  save 
the  universal  emotion  of  hatred  for  the 
enemy  and  of  sorrow  that  this  thing  had 
to  be.  In  September,  when  the  line  still 
held  along  the  rivers,  and  in  October, 
when  the  line  had  lengthened  to  the  sea, 
I  found  France  in  a  state  of  quiet,  sad 
resolution  which  made  the  savage  enthu- 
siasm of  Germany  seem  a  light  thing.  It 
bore  the  stamp  of  a  nation  hoping  for 
victory,  half  expecting  victory,  but,  in  the 
last  emergency,  determined  on  death. 
The  blague  was  gone  out  of  France, 
along  with  the  gaiety  ;  all  her  picturesque 
foolishness,  all  her  cynicisms,  by  which 
she  deceives  one  concerning  her  deeper 
emotions,  were  covered  over  with  this 
genuine  feeling,  as  the  risqu6  posters  of 
Paris  have  been  covered  over  since  the 
war  began  with  the  red,  white  and  blue 
of  the  Republic.  In  short,  she  had  cast 


THE    SOUL   OF   FRANCE       103 

off  the  superficial  qualities,  as  every  people, 
I  suspect,  casts  them  off  in  the  pinch. 
There  remained  only  the  nobly  human. 

Externally,  France  looks  the  part. 
Beyond  the  fighting  zone  the  roads,  so 
lively  in  normal  times  with  diligences, 
country  carts  and  automobiles,  are  very 
lonely.  Most  of  the  automobiles  are  at 
the  Front  on  the  business  of  war  ;  the  rest 
may  not  run  save  on  the  business  of 
Government.  As  the  world  knows  by 
this  time,  four  out  of  five  business  houses 
and  shops  of  Paris  are  boarded  up — closed 
for  the  war.  In  the  provincial  cities,  in 
the  small  towns,  the  ratio  is  even  greater. 
In  old  times,  a  French  town,  whatever 
its  hidden  sins  against  hygiene,  kept  its 
streets  and  pavements  immaculately  clean. 
Now  the  roads  are  dirty,  the  stations 
littered  with  papers  and  refuse,  the  pave- 
ments reek.  Street  cleaning  is  not  among 
the  necessities  ;  and  all  France  is  down 
to  bare  necessity. 

The  railroads  still  maintain  a  show  of 
public  service  ;  but  trains  run  irregularly. 
Sometimes  for  several  days  in  succession 
they  are  hours  behind  the  schedule  or 


104     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

stop  altogether.  By  that,  the  passengers 
perceive,  through  the  veil  which  shrouds 
all  public  affairs  in  the  Europe  of  these 
days,  that  there  is  a  new  movement  of 
troops  toward  the  Front,  or  that  the 
wounded  are  coming  through. 

In  all  France,  from  Paris  clear  south 
to  the  Midi,  that  arrival  of  the  wounded 
is  the  one  event  of  these  days.  By 
policy,  France  sends  her  wreckage  of  war 
as  far  as  possible  from  the  invasion.  Long 
ago,  she  filled  up  the  Midi.  The  hospital 
line  of  the  torn  and  dying  has  been 
creeping  steadily  northward,  choking  the 
public  buildings  and  even  the  schoolhouses 
in  all  the  central  provinces.  Your  crawling 
train,  very  dirty  with  the  universal  neglect 
of  the  times,  stops  overlong  at  a  station. 
You  look  out.  Young  men  wearing  bras- 
sards, nurses  in  the  white,  floating  head- 
dress of  the  French  Red  Cross,  are  taking 
off  the  wounded.  Through  a  crowd  of 
silent,  sympathetic  boys  and  women  pass 
the  stretchers,  each  capped  by  the  pale, 
lined  face  of  a  French  youth,  stolid  with 
that  second  stage  of  grievous  injury  wherein 
a  man  does  not  care,  wherein  emotion 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       105 

and  feeling  become  subsidiary  to  the  job 
of  keeping  alive. 

The  troops,  the  concern  of  keeping  up 
this  war,  first ;  the  wounded,  the  concern 
of  repairing  its  wreckage,  second  ;  after 
which,  France  has  time  and  energy  left 
for  that  fine  French  sentiment  of  family. 
Everywhere,  the  officials  and  officers  are 
cutting  red  tape  to  let  mothers  and  sisters 
and  wives  quickly  reach  the  wounded 
boys. 

I  saw  almost  none  of  the  old-time 
gesticulating  enthusiasm  in  warring  France. 
The  regiments  going  out  from  Paris  and 
Rouen  toward  the  Front,  marched  through 
crowds  as  stolid,  to  all  appearance,  as  the 
crowds  of  a  London  Sabbath.  I  was  in 
Havre  on  the  day  when  the  Belgian 
Government,  driven  from  pillar  to  post, 
arrived  at  its  new  capital.  The  mayor 
had  asked  the  people  to  turn  out  and 
give  the  stranger  welcome.  The  people  of 
Havre  appeared  as  though  they  were 
waiting  for  a  funeral.  Once,  however,  I 
saw  a  French  crowd  which  seemed  infused 
with  that  sense  of  drama  in  the  common- 
place which  marked,  in  better  times,  such 


106    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

events  as  the  arrival  of  an  express  train. 
On  the  road  between  Paris  and  Dieppe  a 
"  special  "  passed  us.  Heads  craned  out 
of  windows,  chatter  and  animation  sud- 
denly ran  down  the  whole  line.  These 
people,  it  appeared,  were  going  down  to 
Dieppe  to  see  their  wounded  relatives  in 
the  base  hospital ! 

We  had,  indeed,  two  such  pilgrims 
of  sentiment  on  our  own  train.  One 
of  them,  a  man  with  a  fine,  keen  face, 
turned  out  to  be  Foran  the  cartoonist. 
His  son,  nineteen  years  old,  a  dragoon, 
had  been  shot  in  the  neck.  Foran  ex- 
hibited with  pride  the  bullet  which  did  it. 
And  every  gesture  of  Foran's  showed  his 
relief.  Also,  there  was  a  beautiful  old 
Frenchwoman  who  came  from  Tours  to 
see  her  son.  She  ruffled  with  pride.  He 
had  been  wounded  for  France  !  But  to 
an  American  woman  who  got  her  confidence 
she  told  a  different  story. 

"  Think  !  "  she  said,  "  his  thigh  is 
broken,  his  poor  thigh !  He  cannot  be 
sent  back  !  He  has  done  his  duty — and  I 
have  him  still !  " 

There   is  not  in  France,   I  suppose,   a 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       107 

woman  so  lonely  that  she  has  not  someone, 
be  he  only  a  boy  from  her  first  communion 
class,  out  there  on  the  line.  Now  the 
French,  for  all  they  have  lost  their  surface 
emotionalism,  retain  that  quality  common 
to  the  emotional  of  showing  feeling  on 
their  faces.  And  those  faces,  as  I  watched 
them  pass,  fell  into  three  types  of  ex- 
pression. •  In  Paris  there  were  a  few  who 
looked  relieved,  like  Foran  and  the  old 
woman  from  Tours.  Someone  near  and 
dear  had  been  wounded  or  captured ; 
there  might  be  others  out  there  in  Hell, 
but  the  dearest  had  escaped  !  There  were 
the  faces,  surmounting  black  dresses  or 
knots  of  black  ribbon,  which  bore  all  the 
marks  of  recent  tears.  Finally — and  this 
was  by  far  the  most  common  class — there 
were  the  faces  drawn  with  tense  anxiety, 
the  anxiety  of  waiting  for  a  blow. 

That  is  the  kind  of  anxiety  which 
expects  the  worst.  Unlike  Germany  and 
England,  France  does  not  publish  death 
lists.  Any  relative  of  a  French  soldier 
may  register  at  the  Mairie  a  request  for 
news  of  the  worst.  Each  French  soldier 
goes  into  action  with  a  numbered  tag  of 


108     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

identification  about  his  neck.  When  he 
dies,  in  action  or  in  hospital,  this  is  taken 
from  him  and  compared  with  his  number 
in  the  official  lists.  From  the  military 
government  in  Bordeaux  to  his  own  district 
the  news  goes  by  post.  Waiting  for  the 
mails  is  anxious  business  in  these  days  ! 
The  process  is  slow  and,  in  such  a  war, 
necessarily  inaccurate.  There  are  places 
along  the  great  line  where  the  piled  up 
dead,  German  with  French,  lie  rotting, 
because  no  one  can  reach  them  under  the 
steady  fire  of  the  guns.  All  along,  of 
course,  the  Germans  as  well  as  the  French 
have  been  burying  the  French  dead.  And 
the  Germans  send  back  no  tags  to 
Bordeaux. 

Though  mails  are  not  running  regularly 
from  the  Front,  though  in  certain  places 
where  the  military  situation  is  delicate, 
privates  are  forbidden  to  write  at  all, 
most  soldiers  manage  by  hook  or  crook 
to  send  letters  home.  When  the  letters 
stop — the  family  fears  the  worst.  There 
may  be  a  black,  blank  wait  of  a  month  ; 
and  then  a  soldier's  letter  to  some  neigh- 
bour, as  likely  as  the  notice  from  the 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       109 

Mairie,  brings  the  worst  of  news.  I  know 
one  French  family  whose  only  son  fell  in 
Alsace  in  the  first  attacks  of  the  war. 
There  was  a  two-months'  silence,  and  then, 
in  October,  they  learned  from  a  wounded 
neighbour  that  he  was  dead.  All  France 
knows  that,  in  the  strictest  sense,  no  news 
usually  means  bad  news. 

The  chambermaid  at  the  hotel  where 
I  lived  in  Paris  was  a  pretty  little  daughter 
of  the  Midi,  just  turned  nineteen.  When 
she  entered  my  room  on  the  first  morning 
her  face  bore  the  mark  of  a  heavy  strain. 
The  next  morning  her  facial  lines  had 
smoothed  themselves  out  to  normal.  She 
had  heard  from  her  husband  in  the  mean- 
time, it  appeared.  He  was  the  valet  of 
the  hotel.  When  the  call  came  they  were 
but  six  months  married.  She  had,  besides, 
a  brother,  three  brothers-in-law,  and  in- 
numerable cousins  with  the  colours.  But 
her  anxieties,  naturally,  centred  on  the 
One.  Now  he  had  drawn  a  melancholy  bit 
of  luck.  His  company  had  lost  heavily 
before  Soissons ;  he  had  borne  himself 
bravely  ;  he  found  himself  promoted  from 
private  to  company  adjutant — equivalent 


110    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

to  our  first  sergeant.  In  that  position,  he 
could  write  often.  She  got  letters  three 
or  four  times  a  week. 

When  I  visited  Paris  again  I  found 
Berthe  a  wraith.  She  had  not  heard, 
now,  for  a  week.  Two  more  days  of  this, 
and  she  smiled  again.  She  had  received 
her  letter.  The  regiment  had  been  on  the 
move  ;  that  was  why  he  could  not  write. 

"  Where  ?  "    I  asked. 

"  Towards  Armentieres,  I  think,"  she 
said.  I  did  not  tell  her,  little  Berthe  who 
did  not  understand  military  affairs,  that 
the  murderous  fighting  of  this  great  cam- 
paign had  shifted  toward  the  Armentieres 
line. 

No  family  in  France  is  without  its  vivid, 
tragic  personal  concern  in  that  struggle 
out  there  to  the  north,  and  no  family  in 
France  is  without  its  story.  An  old 
woman,  long  an  invalid,  died  in  Rouen. 
When  her  only  son  went  out  with  the 
reserves  they  concealed  from  her  the  fact 
that  there  was  even  a  war.  On  the  day  of 
her  funeral  came  the  letter  from  the 
Mairie  :  the  son  had  died  in  action.  In 
a  Norman  chateau  dwelt  a  lady  of  quality. 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE      111 

Her  husband  was  a  captain.  Her  maid's 
husband  was  in  the  ranks  as  a  private. 
One  morning  the  maid  brought  in  the 
letters.  There  was  a  letter  from  the 
Mairie  for  each  of  them.  .  .  . 

And  there  have  been  joyful  surprises, 
too.  Sometimes  those  soldier  letters  from 
the  Front  which  bear,  ahead  of  the  official 
notices,  the  news  that  Jean  or  Jacques  is 
dead,  make  their  mistakes.  And  again 
those  long  silences,  interpreted  by  the 
over-anxious  as  meaning  death,  mean  only 
capture. 

There  is  a  deal  of  subterranean  com- 
munication between  the  belligerent  peoples. 
Letters,  somehow,  filter  through  from 
Germany  and  Austria  to  France  and  Eng- 
land. And  now  and  then  a  mysterious, 
unsigned  message  comes  from  Lucerne  or 
London,  or  even  Rome,  to  say  that  Private 
So-and-so  in  this  or  that  regiment  is  a 
wounded  prisoner  at  Aix,  or  is  an  un- 
wounded  prisoner  grubbing  beet-root  along 
the  Rhine.  Then  there  is  a  family  of 
Paris  happy  after  long  strain — or  compara- 
tively happy.  For  one  safe  soldier,  alas  ! 
does  not  entirely  lift  the  strain  in  times 


112     MEN,    WOMEN   AND    WAR 

when  all  the  young  men,  and  many  of  the 
middle-aged  men,  are  gone  to  war. 

To  me,  indeed,  those  middle-aged 
soldiers,  grizzled  in  the  hair,  a  little 
tight  in  the  waist-line,  dragged  out  from 
counter  and  desk  or  raped  from  bench  and 
plough  to  don  kepi  and  red  trousers  and 
fight  with  the  Territorials,  give  one  of  the 
chief  pathetic  touches.  The  Territorials, 
at  the  time  when  I  last  saw  France,  had 
been  called  out  up  to  the  age  of  forty- six. 
Typically,  of  course,  they  were  men  of 
family,  settled  down  in  life,  far  beyond 
the  age  when  one  thinks  of  war  as  romance. 
The  Frenchman  of  the  black  type  takes 
on  an  early  appearance  of  age.  Many  of 
the  pleasant,  polite  old  fellows  who  in- 
spected my  laissez-passers  along  the  roads 
looked  like  Grand  Army  veterans. 

I  saw  a  regiment  of  these  oldsters  tak- 
ing their  ease  on  a  pleasant  Sunday  in 
October.  The  Government  had  set  them 
to  digging  trenches  in  a  town  not  far  from 
Paris.  They  were  recruited  from  the 
capital ;  wherefore  their  wives  and  babies 
had  come  out  by  train  to  visit  them  on  the 
holiday.  French  fashion,  these  family 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       113 

groups  strolled  through  the  fields,  picking 
flowers  and  enjoying  the  landscape.  When 
the  families  parted  that  night,  these  French 
were  for  once  emotional. 

I  took  this  at  the  time  for  a  superfluous 
bit  of  drama,  because  these  Territorials 
are  nominally  home  defenders,  and  the 
enemy  was  then  held  safe  to  the  north. 
Perhaps  it  was  not  quite  superfluous  after 
all.  At  Calais,  a  few  weeks  later,  the  fog 
of  war  lifted  enough  for  us  to  hear  that 
two  divisions  of  Territorials  had  broken 
at  La  Bassee  and  had  caused  great  tem- 
porary embarrassment  to  the  Allied  line. 
And  some  of  these  grey-haired  soldiers 
proved  it  by  coming  wounded  into  the 
hospitals.  Poor  old  boys,  past  their  legi- 
timate days  for  war  !  Why,  with  first- 
line  troops  available  farther  south,  older 
men  were  thrown  into  the  line,  no  civilian 
knows.  But  down  they  go  with  the  boys, 
these  fine,  middle-aged,  settled  Frenchmen 
— the  most  intelligent  class  of  men  in  the 
world,  I  suppose. 

This  France  away  from  the  lines  has 
become  a  world  of  women,  of  old  men, 
of  the  infirm.  Paris,  by  the  end  of 

i 


114    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

October,  had  rebounded  from  her  first 
shock  and  from  her  panic  at  the  approach 
of  the  Germans.  Of  evenings  the  pave- 
ments ran  full.  Two  or  three  cinema 
shows  had  opened  along  the  Boulevard 
des  Italiens. 

That  struck  me,  by  the  way,  with  a 
violent  sense  of  contrast.  Paris,  the  play- 
house of  the  world — Paris  down  to  moving 
picture  shows,  exactly  like  one  of  our 
small  Middle  Western  cities !  Indeed, 
even  those  amusements  found  but  slender 
patronage.  There  was  no  music  ;  France 
in  her  present  mood  does  not  tolerate 
even  playing  on  the  piano. 

The  crowds  simply  drifted  soberly  down 
the  streets ;  and  they  gave  a  queer, 
composite  effect  of  physical  weakness. 
For,  excepting  a  few  foreign  residents, 
there  were  on  the  streets  only  women,  old 
men  and  those  narrow-chested  weaklings 
passed  by  the  army  surgeons,  known  as 
reformes.  In  these  times,  one  learns 
by  the  removal  of  the  background  how 
large  is  the  foreign  population  of  Paris. 
But  even  this  touch  of  lusty  young 
foreign  manhood  is  lacking  to  the  pro- 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       115 

vincial  cities.  There  no  one  walks  the 
streets  of  nights  ;  there,  only  those  shops 
which  minister  to  bare  necessities  keep 
open  of  days ;  there,  save  for  a  few 
Government  officials,  one  sees  no  men  of 
lusty  youth  or  middle  age.  The  popula- 
tion has  shrunk  to  children,  to  boys — and 
to  women. 

France  has  always  been  fortunate  in 
her  efficient,  planning,  saving,  under- 
standing women,  partners  rather  than 
wives.  If  the  "  little  French  stocking  " 
paid  the  indemnity  of  the  Franco-Prussian 
war,  if  it  built  the  bank  balance  which 
controlled  the  finances  of  Europe,  Madame 
rather  than  Monsieur  is  the  responsible 
person.  Now,  with  the  men  gone, 
Madame  has  taken  up  the  business  of  the 
shop  and  the  farm.  In  the  little  wayside 
groceries  and  village  stores,  she  is  selling 
out  such  stock  as  remains,  and  trying  to 
get  more  stock  by  virtue  of  railroads 
concerned  mainly  with  the  business  of  war. 
The  most  pathetic  inanimate  things  in 
war-time  France  are  the  signs,  now 
stained,  torn  and  bedraggled,  advertising 
week-end  trips,  automobiles,  or  those 

12 


116    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

articles  which  minister  to  the  pretty  follies 
of  women.  "  A  sorrow's  crown  of  sorrows 
is  remembering  happier  things." 

Next  in  order  for  pathos  are  those  little 
shops  with  half  the  shelves  bare,  and  the 
rest  broken  by  spaces  where  this  or  that 
necessity  has  been  sold  out.  Behind  the 
counter  sits  Madame,  knitting,  sad-eyed 
or  apprehensive  as  the  news  has  come  to 
her.  Yet  still  she  keeps  that  eye  out  for 
the  franc  !  That  is  her  business  in  this 
war — to  make  the  wheels  of  everyday 
life  go  round. 

Madame  on  the  farm  has  been  managing, 
with  such  decrepit  horses  as  the  army 
has  been  able  to  spare,  to  get  the  fall 
ploughing  done.  Here,  too,  the  Govern- 
ment is  helping,  for  in  this  war  of  exhaus- 
tion the  nation  must  have  harvests.  The 
Naval  Reserve  and  certain  detachments 
of  Territorials  have  been  told  off  to  help 
in  this  work.  But,  after  all,  the  chief 
force  behind  the  plough  is  Madame  the 
paysanne.  As  I  watched  the  sturdy 
middle-aged  peasant  women,  the  fresh 
young  peasant  girls,  steering  their  ploughs 
along  the  furrows,  I  was  troubled  with  a 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE      117 

vague  memory.  It  came  to  me  at  last — 
the  old  days  in  the  West  when  the  pioneer 
woman  put  her  hand  to  the  plough  with 
the  men.  Extremes  meet  curiously  in 
this  time  when  our  higher  civilisation  has 
been  put  to  such  a  test  of  primitive  valour 
as  the  old  West  never  dreamed. 

Housekeeping  is  down  to  strict  necessity 
and  even  lower.  France  will  feed  herself, 
unless  she  be  wholly  invaded — no  fear 
on  that  score.  Even  though  the  British 
navy  should  lose  hold  of  the  seas,  leaving 
her  without  imports,  she  can  exist  from 
her  farms.  But  here  and  there  she  feels 
the  pinch  already.  The  sugar  supply  has 
begun  to  fall  short.  Salt  is  scarce.  Of 
certain  perishable  foods,  on  the  other 
hand,  there  is  an  embarrassment  of  plenty. 
France  has  exported  northward  much  fruit 
and  great  supplies  of  vegetables.  With 
the  export  trade  cut  off,  apples  are  rotting 
on  the  trees  and  vegetables  are  spoiling 
for  sheer  glut  of  the  market. 

The  French  consider  mineral  water 
almost  a  staple  of  life.  In  some  towns, 
notably  in  Paris,  one  could  get  mineral 
water  in  October ;  in  some  it  was  not  to  be 


118    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

had  for  any  money.  The  stock  of  candy 
is  nearly  gone  ;  there  is  a  shortage  in  many 
of  the  condiments  by  which  French  cooks 
make  anything  palatable.  On  the  coasts, 
at  least,  there  is  still  a  supply  of  fish — 
the  Government  has  for  the  present  ex- 
empted the  fishermen  so  that  they  can 
do  their  share  in  feeding  France.  Away 
from  the  sea-coast,  the  supply  of  fish 
depends  upon  the  uncertain  movement  of 
the  trains. 

More  serious  is  the  coal  shortage  :  France 
must  go  pretty  cold  this  winter.  The 
Germans  held  all  summer  and  autumn 
the  coal  mines  of  the  northern  strip.  The 
rest  of  the  mines,  their  workmen  exempted 
as  a  military  necessity,  must  serve  first 
of  all  the  navy  and  the  arms  factories. 
Even  at  that,  coal  is  a  bulky  burden  to 
the  railroads,  which  are  running  irregularly. 
Everywhere  the  peasants  are  stripping  the 
last  branches  from  the  trees  in  order  to 
keep  the  pot  boiling  this  winter.  Yet 
Madame  goes  on,  in  her  serious  French 
fashion,  making  the  best  of  what  she  has. 
If  it  be  only  black  bread  and  cabbage 
soup — it  is  for  France. 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE      119 

"The  little  French  stocking,"  which 
Madame  has  filled — it  serves  France  well 
in  these  ghastly  days.  France  has,  of 
course,  her  ne'er-do-wells  who  would  be 
poor  in  any  land.  But  your  typical  French 
mechanic  has  his  reserve  in  bank ;  and 
typically  that  reserve  is  keeping  his 
family  while  he  fights  out  on  the  long 
frontier. 

The  Government,  it  is  true,  makes  its 
regular  allowance  to  the  families  of  soldiers 
— a  franc  and  a  quarter  a  day  to  the  wife 
and  an  additional  sum  for  every  child. 
Yet  the  Government  has  been  astonished, 
I  understand,  to  find  how  little  of  this 
allowance  has  been  used.  The  mayor 
of  a  southern  city  told  me  that  not  more 
than  a  third  of  the  women  entitled  to 
this  bounty  had  claimed  it.  In  this  need 
the  women  give  it  back  to  France. 

And  the  charity  of  your  Frenchwoman  ; 
and  the  constant  call  on  her  charity  !  Of 
course,  since  a  nation  is  composed  of  all 
sorts  and  conditions  of  people,  there  re- 
main always  the  constitutionally  selfish 
women,  the  constitutionally  frivolous 
women.  France  holds  in  her  border 


120    MEN,    WOMEN   AND    WAR 

such  women  as  that  mondaine  who  drove 
up  to  a  Red  Cross  hospital  in  a  natty 
Red  Cross  uniform  and,  upon  being  asked 
to  help  with  the  wounded,  responded  that 
it  wasn't  exciting  enough  there — she 
wanted  to  get  under  the  guns.  France 
includes  such  women  as  those  two  whom 
an  officer  just  from  the  firing  line  heard 
discussing  in  the  Paris  tube  the  fashionable 
colour  for  this  winter — whereupon  the 
officer  broke  in  with  : 

"  Mesdames,  the  colour  of  France  this 
winter  will  be  black  !  "  She  includes  also 
those  wives  of  certain  small  towns  in  the 
interior  who  have  rebelled  at  quartering 
troops  from  distant  provinces  because 
they  did  not  like  the  ways  of  these  guests. 
But  such  women  are  the  exception,  not 
the  rule.  The  rest — they  are  giving,  giving, 
giving. 

They  have  need  to  give.  The  northern 
strip  of  France,  her  most  thickly  settled 
district,  is  in  German  hands.  Part  of  the 
people  have  stuck  to  their  houses,  bur- 
rowing in  the  cellars  as  the  shell  fire  has 
swept  over  them  ;  the  rest  have  swarmed 
south.  Those  pathetic  processions  of 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       121 

refugees  have  choked  the  roads  of  western 
Europe  all  this  autumn. 

Much  of  what  was  Belgium  is  in  a  state 
of  migration  to  England,  to  Holland,  but 
mainly  to  France.  By  the  end  of  October 
the  French  Government  was  transporting 
shiploads  of  these  Emigres  from  Calais 
and  the  other  northern  ports  to  the  south, 
where  they  were  forced  to  dispute  with 
the  wounded  for  bedroom  in  the  public 
buildings.  For  the  rest — the  women  of 
France  have  taken  them  into  spare  rooms, 
cowsheds  and  outbuildings.  They  arrive 
weary,  exhausted  with  grief  and  misery, 
and  penniless,  even  those  who  were  well- 
to-do  six  months  ago.  Madame  must  find 
a  way  to  keep  them  fed. 

Those  refugees  are  the  special  pathos 
of  this  war.  After  all,  the  dead  are 
the  dead.  They  went  into  it  nobly  ;  and 
it  was  soon  over  for  them.  But  these 
living  exemplars  of  misery  !  Beyond  their 
miseries  stretch  their  anxieties  ;  they,  like 
all  the  rest,  have  their  relatives  on  the 
line. 

And  beyond  all,  they  have  certain  griefs 
peculiar  to  this  situation.  In  the  con- 


122    MEN,    WOMEN   AND    WAR 

fusion,  the  panic,  the  thousand  and  one 
unforeseen  calamities  of  war,  families  have 
become  separated ;  all  over  France  are 
parents  searching  for  children,  and  children 
for  parents.  Most  Parisian  newspapers 
carry  in  these  days  only  one  kind  of 
advertisements — column  after  column  of 
small  personals  wherein  Madame  X,  refugee, 
asks  for  news  of  her  brother's  family, 
separated  from  her  at  Roye,  or  M.  Y. 
begs  for  information  of  his  daughter,  last 
heard  from  in  Rheims. 

France  knows  another  appeal  to  charity 
which  the  superficial  would  scarcely  per- 
ceive. Though  all  the  young  men  have 
gone  to  war,  really  because  all  the  young 
men  have  gone  to  war,  there  is  a  deal  of 
unemployment.  When  a  factory  closes 
for  want  of  able-bodied  men,  it  throws 
out  of  work  the  women  and  the  old  men. 
Middle-class  women  have  been  obliged 
to  dispense  with  servants  ;  there  is  much 
suffering  in  this  class,  spite  of  public  aid. 
Here,  too,  Madame,  with  her  hoarded 
reserve  in  the  little  French  stocking, 
must  help. 

South  of  Paris  lies  a  chateau,  an  estate 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE      123 

almost  patriarchal.  The  master  is  an 
officer,  gone  to  the  war  ;  Madame  is  left 
in  charge.  She  has  rilled  the  stables, 
stripped  of  their  fine  horses,  with  refugees 
from  northern  France  and  Belgium.  She 
has  given  the  plain  clothes  in  all  the 
family  wardrobe  to  keep  them  warm. 
She  has  stripped  her  beds  to  cover  them 
of  nights.  So  far,  she  has  managed  to 
feed  them.  This  woman  has  kept  all  her 
servants,  though  mostly  without  wages  ; 
and  they  have  accepted  the  terms. 

Many  of  the  refugees,  housed  at  last 
after  weeks  of  wandering,  collapsed  when 
they  reached  this  haven.  Also,  there 
were  three  women  among  them  near  their 
time  with  child.  In  many  districts,  the 
physicians  have  all  gone  to  the  war, 
either  as  surgeons  or  as  plain  soldiers. 
Here,  by  good  fortune,  lived  an  American 
physician  who  saw  the  sick  through.  In 
this  estate  of  refugees,  the  necessities  and 
comforts  of  life  have  been  queerly  dis- 
tributed. Once,  there  was  no  salt  to  be 
had  for  several  days.  Again,  there  was  a 
shortage  of  coffee.  All  these  cares  for  the 
hungry  and  the  sick,  all  these  shortages, 


124     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

are  Madame's  concern.  She  is  a  busy 
woman.  And  yet  she  walks  like  the  rest 
in  constant  apprehension  of  what  to- 
morrow's mails  may  bring  ! 

In  the  intervals  between  their  other 
cares,  the  women  knit — knit  eternally 
and  to  better  purpose  than  those  Parisian 
women  who  knitted  about  the  guillotine 
when  heads  were  falling.  Winter  is 
coming  on.  It  will  be  cold  campaigning 
along  the  Great  Line.  The  boys  will  need 
warm  stockings  and  mufflers.  The  great 
spinning  districts  of  the  north  being  in 
German  hands,  the  supply  of  yarn  is 
falling  short.  Madame  is  ravelling  her 
knitted  articles  of  household  adornment, 
and  even  her  petticoats  for  yarn — symbol 
of  the  last  ounce  of  effort  for  France. 

It  was  one  of  these  knitting  women 
who  summed  up  for  me  all  the  woman- 
hood of  France  in  this  period  of  tragic 
stress.  I  had  stopped  at  an  inn  on  the 
road  between  Havre  and  Caudebec.  The 
waitress  laid  down  her  knitting  as  she 
rose  to  serve  me.  When  she  had  attended 
to  my  wants,  she  took  it  up  again.  She 
was  of  the  blond,  Norman  type,  a  comely 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       125 

girl  enough.  She  was  dressed  in  black, 
and  the  outlines  of  her  eyes  were  blurred. 
In  her  pose  over  the  knitting,  in  every 
move  of  her,  appeared  a  divinity  of 
grief — a  Madonna  quality. 

I  watched  her  a  long  time  surreptitiously 
before  she  called  up  a  memory.  Two 
years  before  I  had  put  into  this  inn  with 
a  gay  automobile  party.  This  very  maid 
had  served  us — and  slanged  us.  She  was 
the  French  version  of  the  lively,  impudent 
American  waitress  who  keeps  her  wits 
sharp  by  bandying  repartee  with  travelling 
men,  the  type  which  our  playwrights 
love.  Now,  she  was  doing  a  man's  work 
as  the  hotel  porter  as  well  as  her  woman's 
work,  doing  it  all  in  a  fog  of  grief,  and 
finding  time  between  grief  and  work  to 
knit  for  the  Republic.  I  suppose  that 
war  such  as  this,  with  its  wholesale 
machine-made  murder,  renders  most  men 
brutes,  at  least  for  the  time.  The  bar- 
barities have  not  been  monopolised  by 
one  nation.  But  it  renders  women  divine. 

And  not  the  least  admirable  thing  about 
France  in  her  period  of  stress  is  the 
manner  in  which  the  women  keep  their 


126    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

griefs  to  themselves — their  spiritual  pluck. 
Families,  they  tell  me,  have  concealed  the 
loss  of  sons  even  from  their  nearest 
neighbours.  Where  all  must  suffer,  it  is 
ignoble  to  indulge  grief  publicly.  A 
little  salesgirl  in  a  Parisian  cigar  shop  was 
engaged  ;  they  should  have  been  married 
in  the  autumn.  The  war  took  him  away. 
A  communicative  American  used  to  chat 
with  her  as  he  bought  his  morning  cigar. 
He  knew  her  story. 

"  Any  news  ?  "  he  asked  one  morning— 
and  then  caught  full  sight  of  her  face  and 
stopped. 

"  Non,  monsieur,  pas  de  nouvelles"  she 
said,  and  looked  quickly  down  at  her 
work.  Then  he  noticed  for  the  first  time 
that  she  was  sewing  black  ribbon  on  her 
hat! 

France,  with  the  same  pride  in  the 
little  schoolhouse  which  we  ourselves  know, 
is  keeping  up  public  education.  As  I 
write  the  children  are  reciting  their  lessons 
at  Dunkirk,  within  sound  of  the  guns. 
Of  course,  the  schoolmasters  of  military 
years  have  gone  to  the  war ;  but  women 
teachers,  in  many  cases  their  wives,  have 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       127 

stepped  into  their  places.  At  Chartres 
a  woman  teacher,  the  wife  of  the  master, 
appeared  one  morning  in  black.  She  went 
through  with  the  routine  that  day  to  the 
last  detail,  though  the  black  meant  that 
he  had  fallen.  But  there  was  work  to 
do — his  work. 

Now  I  would  be  a  fool  to  pretend  that 
I  understand  the  French  people  ;  but  I 
believe  from  what  I  have  seen  and  through 
report  from  every  corner  of  France,  borne 
by  those  who  know  them  well,  that  this 
"  gameness,"  this  bearing  a  disaster 
bravely  and  with  a  determination  to  see 
it  all  through  to  a  finish,  is  the  soul-cast 
of  France.  A  people  is  a  people,  made 
up  from  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men 
and  women,  but  France  as  a  whole — 
both  France  on-the-line  and  stay-at-home 
France — has  determined  to  go  through 
with  it  nobly  to  the  end. 

Hating  war  to  the  bottom  of  my  heart, 
my  dreams  tormented  with  its  miseries 
and  with  the  downfall  of  all  good  causes 
which  has  followed  the  Madness  in 
Europe,  I  yet  found  my  spirits  better  in 
quiet,  closed-up  Paris  than  in  that  city 


128    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

across  the  Channel  which  was  proceeding 
with  her  pleasure,  keeping  her  theatres 
running,  attending  to  her  business,  almost 
as  though  there  were  no  war.  I  thought 
at  first  that  it  was  because  Paris,  even 
in  her  grief,  is  still  Paris  ;  she  had  in  old 
days  the  fairly  magic  faculty  of  raising 
one's  spirits.  She  is,  I  thought,  like  one  of 
those  merry  and  generous  human  beings 
who  smile  even  in  mortal  illness  and  in 
death. 

Yet  that  did  not  wholly  account  for 
Paris  ;  and  the  full  answer  came  to  me 
not  from  a  Frenchman  at  all,  but  from 
a  wounded  captain  in  the  British  aviation 
corps  whom  I  helped  across  the  Channel. 

His  was  one  of  those  adventures  which 
would  have  been  almost  a  world-story 
six  months  ago,  but  which  is  now  become 
a  commonplace.  He  was  "  marking  "  for 
the  batteries  at  a  height  of  four  thousand 
feet,  just  inside  the  danger  zone,  when 
a  shot  from  a  German  aeroplane  gun 
smashed  his  left  spar.  The  machine  wilted 
and  wobbled  ;  with  all  the  skill  he  had, 
he  kept  it  on  an  even  keel  while  he  vol- 
planed into  his  own  lines.  At  a  hundred 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE       129 

feet  in  the  air,  the  aeroplane  collapsed, 
— fortunately  for  him,  over  soft  ground. 

14 1  ought  to  be  dead,"  he  said  cheer- 
fully. 

He  was  very  much  the  man,  of  course  ; 
and  also  very  much  the  British  officer. 
His  one  concern  was  lest,  when  we  took 
him  from  boat  to  train,  people  should 
make  a  fuss  over  him.  "  Makes  you  feel 
like  a  fool,"  he  said.  But  the  jar,  I  take 
it,  had  shaken  off  a  little  of  his  native 
shyness  ;  for  after  a  time  he  opened  up  to 
us  the  soul  of  the  fighting  man. 

"  When  you  start,"  he  said,  "  you  make 
up  your  mind  that  you're  dead.  Of  course 
you  will  be  sooner  or  later.  When  they 
get  you,  and  you're  four  thousand  feet 
in  the  air,  there's  no  escape.  My  case 
just  happens  to  be  a  miracle.  And  after 
you've  fully  made  up  your  mind  to  die, 
it's  a  glorious  sensation  ! — You  can't  know 
how  cheerful  a  man  feels  up  there  !  " 

Now  that  glory  of  the  fighting  man  in 
his  resolution  to  die  explains,  I  think, 
what  I  felt  in  France.  It  would  be 
straining  truth  to  pretend  that  she  has 
reached  such  an  exaltation  of  courage  as 

K 


130    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

had  my  aviator,  but  she  approaches  this 
mood.  She  has  made  up  her  mind  to 
go  through  with  it ;  there  is  relief  in  the 
thought — a  certain  cheerfulness,  unnatural 
perhaps,  but  still  genuine. 

For  the  psychology  of  the  great 
European  disaster  is  peculiar.  Once, 
they  tell  me,  the  young  man  who  enlisted 
had  the  feeling  that  the  bullets  wouldn't 
get  him ;  some  other  fellow  maybe,  but 
not  him.  In  this  war  of  shells  which 
annihilate  a  whole  company  at  a  time, 
of  frontal  attacks  which  drop  rank  after 
rank  for  the  poor  prize  of  one  trench,  of 
mines  which  shoot  up  horror  from  the 
ground,  of  flying  machines  which  drop 
horror  from  the  air — in  this  war  men  enter 
the  ranks  with  the  thought  of  certain 
death  in  their  hearts.  Joffre  knew  his 
people  when  he  issued  his  general  order 
before  the  Battle  of  the  Marne. 

"  Advance  as  far  as  you  can  ;  when  you 
can  no  longer  advance,  stand  and  die  !  " 

France  as  an  entity  had  faced  the  fact 
of  death  ;  there  is  peace  in  the  thought. 

The  French  have  surprised  us  once  in 
this  war.  Caught  off  their  guard,  in- 


THE   SOUL   OF   FRANCE      131 

sufficiently  mobilised,  they  took  a  thorough 
beating  and  came  back  to  victory,  so 
killing  the  tradition  that  they  cannot 
rally  from  defeat.  We  have  formed  a 
new  picture  ;  and  they  may  shatter  that, 
too.  I  would  not  be  fool  enough  to 
prophesy  that  the  strain  along  the  Great 
Line  will  not  become  too  heavy — even 
before  these  words  are  printed — for 
human  endurance.  But  I  think  not.  I 
think  that  France  is  going  through  with  it, 
strong  to  the  end,  whether  that  end  be 
the  restoration  of  peace  to  her  sons  and 
their  sons,  or  national  annihilation. 


K2 


V 

THE  BRITISH  CALM 
December,  1914 

"  BEHIND  the  lines  in  northern  France," 
as  the  reports  in  the  London  newspapers 
say.  Night  falling :  in  the  distance  the 
noise  of  the  guns,  sounding  like  occasional 
taps  on  a  far-away  drum.  We  were  pass- 
ing through  a  village  of  Pas-de-Calais  now, 
a  hamlet  really.  One  of  the  old,  fortified 
farms  of  Normandy  flanked  it  on  the 
northern  edge ;  the  turrets  flew  the  Red 
Cross.  By  the  entrance,  two  French  Terri- 
torials stopped  me  to  look  at  my  papers. 
As  always  with  these  French  sentries,  they 
smiled  when  they  found  that  the  papers 
were  perfectly  regular  and  seemed  disposed 
to  pass  the  time  of  day. 

"  You'll  see  some  Belgians  in  a  minute, 
if  you  wait,"  said  one  of  them.  And 


132 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          138 

presently  out  of  the  gathering  dusk  crept 
a  file  of  men  in  blue  uniforms  and  little 
caps  shaped  like  a  Russian  sleigh,  with 
yellow  tassels  nodding  on  the  forepeak. 

Those  tassels  were  incongruously,  fool- 
ishly gay  !  The  rest  of  their  uniforms  was 
so  rusty,  so  dirty,  so  stained,  that  it  was 
hard  to  recognise  their  original  colour. 
The  faces  below  the  nodding  tassels  wore 
beards  of  three  months'  growth.  The  lines 
of  these  faces  drooped,  and  the  military 
straightness  had  gone  from  the  shoulders. 

I  knew,  even  before  my  French  sentry 
told  me,  what  I  was  seeing.  These  were 
the  men  relieved  from  the  line.  In  these 
days  of  eternal  fighting — a  battle-line  three 
hundred  miles  long  now,  a  battle  which 
has  lasted  three  months  on  its  eastern 
wing  and  a  month  on  its  western — men 
cannot  stand  the  strain  for  more  than  a 
few  days.  That  clamour  of  the  great  guns, 
more  than  the  horror  which  goes  with  the 
work  of  the  guns,  makes  the  strongest 
man,  in  time,  a  nervous  wreck. 

These  regiments  had  been  relieved ; 
they  were  going  to  guard  the  rear.  Fresh 
troops,  or  troops  as  nearly  fresh  as  the 


134    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

Belgians  had  after  their  three  months  of 
fighting  back,  back,  and  ever  back,  were 
coming  up  to  replace  them  in  the  struggle 
for  the  bridge-head  at  the  Yser. 

With  that  American  enthusiasm  which 
matches  so  ill  the  present  grim,  grey  mood 
of  Europe,  I  leaned  out  to  cheer  them. 
Few  of  them  even  glanced  up.  One  or  two 
waved  a  feeble  gesture  of  recognition ; 
but  the  rest  simply  plodded  on.  Body  and 
soul,  they  seemed  spent. 

It  was  the  next  evening,  one  of  those 
autumn  evenings  too  beautiful  for  war 
which  have  blessed  Europe  in  her  year  of 
trial,  when  another  column  came  crawling 
toward  me  through  the  dust.  I  caught 
the  dull  brown  of  their  uniforms,  and  we 
drew  up  at  a  crossroads  to  let  them  pass. 
These  were  the  English  come,  like  the 
Belgians,  from  action.  I  waited,  expec- 
tant, to  see  how  strain  of  great  guns, 
misery,  sight  of  death  and  wounds  affected 
them. 

They  came  on  at  a  loose,  easy  route- 
step,  their  rifles  carried  in  every  position 
known  to  the  manual  of  arms.  And  the 
first  thing  I  noted  was  the  absence  of 


THE   BRITISH  CALM  135 

beards.  They  were  shaved  !  Their  uni- 
forms, dusty  with  the  march,  were  still 
not  caked  with  mud  like  those  of  the 
Belgians.  Every  strap,  every  button, 
seemed  in  place. 

As  they  passed,  they  scrutinised  me  with 
cool,  Anglo-Saxon  glances  of  distant  curi- 
osity. Not  a  face  among  them  seemed 
drawn,  like  the  faces  of  the  Belgians.  For 
all  they  showed  it  in  expression,  in  gait, 
or  in  the  carriage  of  their  shoulders,  they 
might  have  been  parading  in  Hyde  Park 
or  shifting  positions  on  the  line.  Next 
morning,  as  I  knew  from  those  who  have 
seen  the  British  Army  more  closely  than 
I,  they  would  rise  from  a  sound  night's 
sleep  and  go  to  playing  football.  And  it 
would  not  matter  to  them  that  since  the 
last  game  one  side  or  the  other  had  lost 
a  goal-keeper  or  a  forward  ! 

The  Belgian  came  back  from  action  a 
wreck.  That  does  not  mar  his  soldierly 
quality  when  he  returns  to  the  line  ;  these 
sons  of  disaster,  though  a  little  inexpert  in 
the  technique  of  fighting,  are  great  soldiers. 
Your  Frenchman — grim,  stark,  scientific 
warrior  that  he  is  in  action — permits  him- 


136    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

self  the  luxury  of  a  little  emotion  when 
the  strain  has  passed.  The  German,  I 
understand,  comes  out  singing,  if  not 
with  spontaneity,  at  least  with  deter- 
mination. The  Englishman  comes  out— 
a  British  soldier,  serene  through  it  all. 

I  knew  how  the  Briton  takes  war  ;  this 
was  the  first  time  I  had  seen  the  ex- 
emplar. And  my  mind  carried  a  long  way 
back,  to  a  ring  side  in  San  Francisco. 
Terry  McGovern  and  Young  Corbett  were 
fighting  for  the  featherweight  champion- 
ship of  the  world — McGovern,  the  Celt, 
with  that  blazing  quality  of  nerve  and 
courage  common  to  the  Celt,  the  Gaul,  and 
the  Belgian ;  Corbett,  for  all  his  Irish 
ring  name,  of  pure  English  stock.  Now 
he  had  a  sharp,  stinging  tongue,  this 
Corbett.  He  had  beaten  McGovern  before, 
he  was  to  beat  him  again,  by  insulting  him, 
during  their  exchanges  of  repartee  in  the 
clinches,  to  the  point  of  madness.  When 
McGovern  grew  angry,  he  threw  science  to 
the  winds  ;  he  would  rush,  swinging  his 
arms  like  flails,  and  Corbett  would  drop 
him. 

Six  rounds  of  this,  and  McGovern  struck 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          137 

Corbett  from  his  knees.  And,  as  though 
infected,  Corbett  grew  angry.  His  grey 
eyes  snapped  :  he  squared  off  as  McGovern 
rose.  But  it  was  a  different  kind  of  anger. 
It  was  cold,  snaky,  sinister,  perfectly  con- 
trolled. It  made  his  blows  deadlier,  his 
reflexes  faster.  He  closed  in ;  he  beat 
McGovern  backward  to  the  ropes ;  the 
fight  was  over.  I  thought  then,  I  thought 
again,  as  I  watched  the  English  column 
crawling  down  the  Pas-de-Calais,  that  I 
knew  why  the  Englishman  had  so  long 
held  government  over  this  world.  Above 
all  his  powers,  he  has  an  armour  of  self- 
control  which  nothing  can  dent. 

All  of  which  has  been  his  strength  in 
old  times.  And  all  of  which,  in  this 
supreme  struggle  for  national  existence 
under  new  world-conditions,  comes  near 
to  being  his  weakness.  Indeed,  the  super- 
ficial believe  absolutely  that  it  is  his  weak- 
ness. I  am  not  so  sure. 

Let  us  consider,  in  that  light,  the  whole 
state  of  the  Empire  militant. 

For  the  two  hundred  or  more  years 
during  which  the  Empire  was  building, 
for  the  hundred  years  during  which  it  was 


138     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

the  chief  political  fact  in  the  world,  Little 
England  went  through  a  curious  selective 
process.  The  adventurous,  the  merry,  the 
enterprising,  have  drained  themselves  off 
to  the  Colonies ;  year  after  year,  as  the 
process  went  on,  they  left  behind  the  set, 
the  unenterprising,  or  the  conservatively 
able. 

The  people,  noble  or  common,  who  lived 
upon  inherited  wealth,  the  men  of  high 
talent  or  genius  who  manage  the  Empire  in 
all  its  activities,  and  the  parasites  upon 
these  classes — they  made  the  social  com- 
position of  the  Island  population.  The 
slums  of  London  were,  after  all,  the  slums 
not  of  one  nation  but  of  a  whole  empire. 
The  vast  body  of  entailed  property,  such 
a  perplexity  in  later  times,  was  the  en- 
tailed property  of  an  empire.  Her  con- 
servatism, her  misery,  much  of  her  highest 
ability,  were  drawn  off  into  one  grouping, 
half  a  world  away  from  her  real  liberalism, 
her  opportunity,  and  her  average  ability. 

There  they  sat,  secure  in  their  isolation. 
As  the  jingo  songs  kept  reminding  them, 
they  had  little  need  of  armies ;'  the  seas 
and  the  navy  took  care  of  that.  Their 


THE  BRITISH  CALM  139 

national  character  set  also.  That  quality 
of  self-control  hardened  into  a  quality 
of  imperturbability.  They  tended  to  re- 
gard England,  and  the  institutions  of 
England,  as  things  eternal,  not  temporal. 

Upon  that  theory,  they  proceeded  with 
their  national  life.  Their  Church  had  a 
ritual  which  changed  not.  Their  universi- 
ties devoted  themselves  not  to  research 
but  to  culture — last  decoration  of  a  civi- 
lisation that  is  finished  for  all  time.  Their 
captains  of  industry,  their  business  men, 
showed,  usually,  considerable  impatience 
with  change  in  methods  ;  they  were  half 
a  lap  behind  Germany  and  America  in 
adapting  themselves  to  modern  conditions 
and  methods.  If  they  kept  abreast,  if 
they  kept  ahead,  it  was,  first,  because  of 
their  momentum  and,  second,  because  of 
their  tremendous  natural  ability. 

The  time  when  English  civilisation  began 
to  set  was  a  time  when  individualism 
dominated  the  world,  when  social  team 
work  was  not  yet  dreamed  on.  And  above 
everything  else  this  imperturbable  and  set 
personage,  the  Englishman,  was  an  in- 
dividual, insistent  on  his  individual  rights. 


140    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

He  obeyed,  he  respected  the  law  which  his 
fathers  had  made  for  him  ;  and  it  was  a  law 
of  the  individual.  When  certain  miseries 
in  the  draining-ground  of  the  empire, 
together  with  pressure  from  a  neighbour 
which  understood  team  work,  forced  him 
to  change  those  laws,  he  yielded  only  after 
a  tremendous  struggle. 

Above  all,  he  had  become  really  civilised, 
too  civilised  to  want  war.  England  showed 
that  in  the  Boer  War,  when  a  large  part 
of  the  nation  protested  against  what  they 
considered  conquest.  To  hold  the  Empire 
— yes,  perhaps.  The  British  sense  of  the 
sacredness  in  property  made  him  ready  to 
fight  for  his  right  to  what  he  owned.  For 
further  conquest — no  ! 

The  leaders  of  British  thought  knew  that 
some  day  England  must  clash  with  that 
virile,  aggressive,  ruthless  northern  neigh- 
bour to  whose  rulers  war  had  become  a 
religion.  They  saw,  too,  that  the  navy 
would  not  be  enough  to  win  such  a  war ; 
there  must  be  an  army.  To  meet  on  even 
terms  the  thoroughly  prepared  conscript 
forces  of  Germany,  it  must  be  a  conscript 
army — England  must  have  general  and 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          141 

thorough  military  training  for  their  young 
men. 

But  the  leaders  of  British  thought  knew 
also  that  the  nation  would  never  stand  for 
conscription.  Any  party  which  proposed 
it  would  have  been  swamped.  Kipling's 
fulminations  ;  "  An  Englishman's  Home  "; 
Cramb's  lectures  ;  occasional  alarms  from 
daring  conservatives — none  of  these  took 
effect  with  the  English.  They  had  the 
Navy,  hadn't  they  ?  Well,  then— 

The  war  is  here. 

Now  there  is  a  fog  over  all  public  affairs 
in  Europe,  a  mist  almost  impenetrable. 
It  has  suddenly  become  the  age  of  absolute 
monarchies  and  of  dictatorships.  The  Press 
of  continental  Europe  is  the  servant  of 
these  powers  ;  it  exists  no  longer  to  inform 
the  people  and  to  promote  free  discus- 
sion, but  to  make  the  people  think  what 
the  Government  believes  they  ought  to 
think. 

The  fog  of  war  lies  not  only  over  the 
lines — which  correspondents  reach  only  by 
accident  or  deep  craft — but  over  all  the 
activities  which  have  to  do  with  the 
army ;  and  investigators  are  most  un- 


142    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

welcome.  The  history  of  these  times  will 
never  be  written  from  the  journalism  of 
the  times.  The  battle  stories  of  the  War 
of  the  Nations  will  come  out  in  memorials, 
not  in  newspaper  columns,  and  the  his- 
torians will  be  its  reporters. 

Yet  one  catches  glimpses  here  and  there  ; 
and  he  learns  from  them  how  ill  Britain 
was  prepared,  not  only  to  present  an  army 
for  service  but  to  equip  and  carry  on  an 
army.  This  crisis  has  brought  the  down- 
fall of  our  industrial  world,  as  the  British 
should  have  known  that  it  would  ;  yet  for 
certain  essentials  of  army  supplies  they 
had  been  depending  upon  nations  which 
were  now  their  enemies. 

Many  departments  of  the  Government 
work  were  in  the  hands,  not  of  business 
men,  who  could  run  them  as  a  business, 
but  of  retired  army  officers,  who  knew  only 
routine  method  and  red  tape.  At  that 
very  time  the  city  was  full  of  the  finest 
executive  men  in  the  world ;  men  who 
were  burning  with  patriotism,  longing  to 
do  something  for  England  ;  yet  the  Empire 
did  not  turn  to  them.  The  wheels  creaked 
and  groaned  in  all  the  army  supply  depart- 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          148 

ments,  in  the  Red  Cross,  in  the  censorship, 
even,  perhaps,  in  the  transport  service. 

You  got  glimpses  of  this  process  here 
and  there.  England,  like  all  the  warring 
nations,  reserved  the  right  to  commandeer 
automobiles.  In  one  town  the  order  went 
forth  that  all  cars  of  a  certain  class  should 
be  assembled  in  one  place.  They  were 
assembled— and  lay  parked  there  a  week 
before  anyone  came  to  look  them  over : 
this  at  a  time  when  the  German  auto- 
mobile transport  had  already  served  as  a 
main  factor  in  driving  the  British  and 
French  back  from  the  Belgian  border. 

Grievously  wounded  men,  "  spinal  cases" 
many  of  them,  came  back  to  England  across 
the  rough  Channel,  when  they  might  have 
found  hospital  attendance  in  France.  You 
found  that  certain  regiments  of  new  re- 
cruits were  suffering  for  want  of  blankets, 
even  though  the  enlightened  of  England 
were  willing  to  make  any  sacrifice  for  the 
troops,  least  of  all  a  little  bedding. 

The  Government,  in  common  with  the 
Continental  Governments,  announced  a 
policy  of  public  aid  for  the  dependents  of 
soldiers.  A  month  later,  you  found  that 


144    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

such  aid  had  not  yet  been  distributed  in 
certain  parts  of  London. 

Everywhere  you  saw  that  policy  of 
"  muddle  through,"  which  seems  to  have 
grown  from  a  reproachful  catchword  to  a 
creed  with  certain  classes  of  the  English, 
and  the  policy  of  "  messing  round  with  the 
poor,"  which  is  the  attitude  of  your  upper- 
class  Englishwoman  toward  the  social 
problem. 

The  machinery,  I  say,  creaked.  But  let 
not  an  American,  with  the  memory  of  our 
Spanish  War  behind  him,  grow  too  critical 
with  the  English.  It  did  not  grind  and 
stop,  as  ours  did.  I  have  heard  slight  hints 
of  scandals  in  army  supplies  ;  I  scarcely 
believe  them.  Some  of  the  tunics  which 
came  to  the  troops  were  pretty  shoddy  ; 
but  I  understand  that  the  Government 
knew  just  what  it  was  buying.  The  right 
kind  of  cloth  for  tunics  was  lacking  at 
first ;  inferior  qualities  must  do  for  the 
present. 

As  time  went  on,  you  began  to  perceive 
that  there  is  something,  after  all,  in  the 
British  policy  of  "  muddle  through."  If 
their  imperturbability  had  got  them  into 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          145 

this  fix,  that  same  imperturbability  was 
getting  them  out  of  the  fix.  They  did  not, 
like  more  emotional,  more  mercurial,  or 
less  controlled  people,  become  appalled  at 
the  nature  of  the  problem  and  develop  a 
case  of  "  rattles  "  or  discouragement. 

With  a  kind  of  unsystematic  sense  of 
system,  they  did  what  was  to  be  done — 
the  essentials  first,  the  unessentials  second. 

The  new  volunteers  in  the  Aldershot 
camps  appeared  for  drill  in  the  cast-off 
scarlet  uniforms  of  the  regular  force,  or  in 
no  uniforms  at  all ;  and  so  the  superficial 
said  :  4  They  haven't  even  uniforms  for 
their  men !  "  But  the  army  did  have 
rifles  for  its  men.  The  uniforms  were  not 
yet  necessary ;  and  in  his  first  week's 
enlistment  the  new  British  soldier  was  at 
the  butts,  learning  the  A  B  C  of  soldiering. 

Here  and  there,  when  you  glimpsed  the 
inside  of  things,  you  perceived  with  what 
individual  efficiency  the  able  men  of  Great 
Britain  were  setting  about  to  supply  the 
deficiency  in  certain  goods  which  the  war 
had  cut  off  from  Great  Britain.  "  I'll 
tell  you  how  I  beat  the  French,"  said 
Wellington  once,  in  effect,  *'  they  made 

L 


146     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

their  campaign  like  a  splendid  set  of  har- 
ness. When  they  broke  a  buckle,  they 
had  to  send  for  the  harness  maker.  I 
made  mine  out  of  ropes.  When  I  broke 
anything,  I  tied  a  knot  and  went  ahead." 
Theirs  was  and  is  a  harness  of  ropes, 
that  is  the  kind  of  harness  they  know 
best.  And  they  have  turned  out  to  be  great 
tiers  of  knots. 

With  that  same  imperturbability,  the 
English  people  faced  the  prospect  of 
Armageddon.  It  is  easy  for  an  enthusiastic 
American  to  misunderstand  the  British, 
to  take  their  shyness  and  self-repression 
for  coldness  and  indifference.  Yet,  allow- 
ing even  that,  their  refusal  to  accept  the 
disagreeable  fact  of  war  amounted  to  a 
national  weakness.  Believing  in  England 
as  a  thing  eternal,  it  was  hard  for  them  to 
entertain  the  notion  not  only  of  defeat,  but 
even  of  danger. 

In  the  early  days  of  the  German  advance 
the  War  Office  obtained  the  secret  of  one 
of  Germany's  mechanical  devices.  "It  is 
unthinkable  !  "  was  their  comment.  With- 
in a  week,  Germany  was  making  deadly 
use  of  that  device  ! 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          147 

When  Von  Kluck  was  striding  toward 
Paris  with  the  speed  of  a  practice  march, 
when  Von  Hindenburg  had  annihilated  a 
Russian  army  in  East  Prussia,  when  it 
looked  to  most  Americans  as  though 
Germany  might  be  making  good  her 
boasts,  the  Briton  still  refused  to  entertain 
the  thought  of  defeat,  or  even  of  danger. 
"  What  about  our  navy  ?  "  he  said,  or, 
"  Britain's  a  bulldog,"  or — this  was  almost 
a  stereotyped  phrase — "  It  is  unthink- 
able !  v  The  middle  class,  the  commercial 
class,  seemed  more  concerned  in  the 
patriotic  duty  of  getting  away  German 
commerce  than  in  the  more  obvious  duty 
of  getting  recruits  into  the  army. 

"  England  is  asleep,"  we  said,  we  Ameri- 
cans. We  were  fooled  a  little,  I  allow, 
by  the  constitutional  lack  of  surface  en- 
thusiasm ;  but,  still,  she  dozed.  And  it 
became  almost  a  fascination  to  watch 
her  wake  up — not  as  a  nation,  but 
by  individuals  and  by  sections.  Recruit- 
ing would  proceed  steadily ;  it  would 
slacken ;  then  would  come  a  minor  or 
major  disaster,  like  the  loss  of  the  three 
armoured  cruisers,  the  taking  of  Antwerp, 

L  2 


148     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

the  sinking  of  the  torpedo  boat  at  Deal. 
Next  morning,  there  would  be  a  long 
line  of  men  in  front  of  all  the  recruiting 
offices. 

London,  the  metropolis,  filled  with  those 
far-seeing  men  of  the  upper  class  who 
have  understood  all  along,  London  woke 
first,  of  course.  She  has  borne  all  along 
more  than  her  proportionate  share  of 
enlistment.  The  suppression  of  the 
lights  for  fear  of  Zeppelin  attacks,  the 
absence  of  certain  omnibus  lines,  and 
the  presence  of  officers  back  from  the 
Front,  made  her  look  a  little  like  a  city 
at  war. 

But  just  after  the  fall  of  Antwerp  sent 
a  shiver  through  enlightened  London,  I 
visited  the  manufacturing  district  of  the 
North.  Manchester,  owing  to  a  lack  of 
cotton,  was  in  an  industrial  crisis.  Though 
the  newspapers  splashed  the  war  all  over 
their  front  pages,  she  remained  apparently 
indifferent.  I  scanned  the  notices  of  the 
meetings  in  the  hotels,  the  "  futures " 
of  the  newspapers.  There  was  only  one 
war  meeting  announced  for  the  coming 
week — that  one  a  lecture  by  Mrs.  Pank- 


THE  BRITISH  CALM  149 

hurst.  Business  was  running  briskly  at 
Leeds,  which  makes  woollen  goods  for 
the  army  ;  but  the  people  were  absorbed 
in  that  business,  and  not  in  war. 

The  pottery  district  was  absolutely 
flattened  out ;  factory  after  factory  had 
drawn  all  its  fires,  and  there  people  seemed 
most  concerned  with  their  industrial  dis- 
tress. A  week  more,  an  English  editor 
went  north  to  see  for  himself;  and  he 
found  the  leaven  of  war  working — the 
Midland  counties  were  waking  up. 

But  at  the  very  time  when  I  found  the 
Midland  counties  asleep,  the  superin- 
tendent of  a  steel  factory  in  the  iron 
district  had  to  forbid  his  men  to  enlist — 
the  Government  most  needed  them  where 
they  were.  Some  small  towns,  especially 
in  the  North,  proceeded  on  their  sleepy 
way  ;  some,  for  lack  of  young  men,  looked 
like  villages  in  France. 

Individuality,  the  charm  of  the  Briton, 
his  strength,  and  his  weakness — it  came  out 
here.  I  am  told  by  an  Englishman  con- 
cerned in  this  business  of  getting  recruits 
that  the  secret  of  those  instances  where 
isolated  towns  see  the  emergency  and 


150    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

respond  to  it  is  usually  some  individual. 
A  certain  town  in  Surrey  has  less  than 
five  hundred  inhabitants.  Seventy-nine 
men  have  gone  from  there.  The  vicar  of 
this  parish,  it  happens,  is  a  retired  army 
chaplain.  He  saw  that  all  his  young 
parishioners  enlisted,  or  he  knew  the  reason 
why.  The  villages  where  recruiting  is  al- 
most unknown  lag  behind,  usually,  because 
they  lack  a  leader  with  the  firm  religion  of 
patriotism  to  urge  his  parishioners,  his 
tenants,  or  his  constituents  into  the  ranks. 

As  for  the  remote  northern  towns,  their 
people,  gentry  and  townsfolk  alike,  never 
awake  to  any  national  crisis  until  late  in 
the  day.  An  English  member  of  Parlia- 
ment tells  me  that  when  a  new  issue,  like 
a  mistake  in  policy  or  a  scandal,  arises 
during  a  political  campaign,  it  affects 
London  and  the  South  at  once,  but  it 
scarcely  turns  a  vote  in  the  North.  "*  Un- 
less it's  a  religious  question,"  he  said, 
"  they  respond  six  months  later ;  it  may 
affect  the  next  campaign,  that's  all !  " 

A  million  volunteers,  Territorials  and 
"  Kitchener  Army,"  in  the  first  three 
months — that  is  not  so  bad  for  an 


THE  BRITISH  CALM  151 

unmilitary  nation  of  forty  millions,  after 
all.  Indeed,  considering  this  British  im- 
perturbability, this  refusal  to  get  excited 
over  things,  it  becomes  almost  a  miracle. 
Germany  may  point  out  that,  even  with 
her  conscripts  at  the  Front,  she  has  as 
many  volunteers  from  her  exempt  classes. 

The  cases  are  not  parallel.  In  Germany 
the  "  religion  of  valour  "  was  abroad  ;  the 
public,  with  its  cast  of  opinion  ordered 
from  higher  up,  believed  in  war.  The 
little  children  played  war  games  on  the 
streets.  Just,  kindly,  the  Englishman 
never  believed  in  the  sacredness  of  slaugh- 
ter. And  the  boy  who  enters  the  ranks  of 
the  English  army  does  a  far,  far  better 
thing  than  recruit  ever  did  before.  He 
goes  not  for  romance — there  is  no  romance 
in  the  madness  of  Europe — nor  yet  for 
any  religion  of  valour.  He  goes  for  that 
noblest  motive  in  war — pure  patriotism. 

I  used  to  watch  the  regiments  trailing 
along  the  streets  of  London,  just  to  see 
the  squads  of  new  recruits  but  lately 
impressed  from  the  recruiting  offices  to 
fill  out  the  companies.  They  marched 
with  their  heads  thrown  back ;  for  all 


152    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

their  English  calm,  there  was  a  light  of 
exaltation  in  their  eyes.  They  looked 
like  people  going  to  take  a  sacrament.  A 
far,  far  nobler  thing  than  any  conscript 
has  ever  done  ! 

It  is  an  axiom  of  this  war,  among  the 
English,  that  a  diagram  of  the  recruiting 
would  look  like  an  hour-glass,  widest  at 
the  top  and  bottom.  The  upper  class 
and  the  lower  classes  have  responded 
to  the  call  rather  than  that  set  middle 
class,  which,  like  the  farmer  class  of  the 
North,  finds  it  hard  to  stir  over  any  issue 
save  a  religious  one. 

I  should  venture  to  say  that  the  pro- 
portion is  immeasurably  in  favour  of  the 
upper  class.  I  should  even  venture  to  add 
that,  if  we  could  get  statistics,  we  should 
find  this  class  recruited  nearly  up  to 
conscript  standards.  They  know,  and 
they  have  known  all  the  time,  the  peril 
of  the  Empire.  Their  old  tradition  of 
noblesse  oblige  makes  lagging,  in  this  crisis, 
shameful. 

The  officers  of  the  British  army 
come  mainly  from  among  these  people. 
Every  upper-class  man  who  could  possibly 


THE  BRITISH  CALM  153 

make  an  officer  is  in  training — or  under 
a  cloud.  To  an  extent  which  statistics 
will  never  show  us,  the  rest  serve  already 
in  the  ranks.  I  stood  on  a  street  corner 
of  Paris  once  and  heard  a  British  Tommy 
in  the  transport  service  tell  how  "  Private 
Pearson  "  had  been  shot  by  his  side  while 
they  were  escaping  from  the  Germans. 
This  Pearson,  it  came  out,  was  Lord 
Cowdray's  son.  "  Sirs  "  and  "  Honour- 
ables  "  occur  in  the  lists  of  privates  killed. 
I  visited  Oxford  in  October,  just  when 
the  colleges  were  opening.  I  found  eight 
hundred  students  registered  where  there 
had  been  five  thousand  the  year  before  ! 
It  looked  like  vacation  in  the  quadrangles. 
The  notices  on  the  bulletin  boards  were 
mainly  of  a  military  character  ;  and  both 
town  and  college  buildings  were  filled  with 
wounded.  Oxford,  in  short,  seemed  to  me 
the  only  English  town  whose  externals 
brought  home  the  reality  of  war,  like  any 
place  you  may  care  to  name  in  France. 
And  Oxford,  of  course,  is  "  upper  class  " — 
in  our  sense,  if  not  quite  in  the  English 
sense.  Statistics  showed  in  October  that 
between  thirty  and  forty  per  cent,  of  the 


154     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

"Old  Boys"  from  the  English  public 
schools  were  serving  the  army  in  some 
capacity. 

Indeed,  the  naked  eye  of  the  casual 
observer  could  perceive  this  prevalence 
of  the  upper  class  in  the  ranks.  The 
recruits,  the  "  Kitchener  Army,"  did  not 
generally  appear  like  the  average,  old- 
time  English  Tommy  at  all.  You  saw 
squads  of  privates  who  looked  as  though 
they  should  be  officers ;  through  every 
detachment  ran  that  rangy,  knife-built 
Norman  type. 

I  have  spoken  of  Manchester.  There  I 
saw  a  regiment,  just  recruited,  march 
through,  still  in  civilian  clothes,  with  rain 
coats  slung  over  their  shoulders  in  place 
of  blanket  rolls.  And  they  contrasted 
sharply  with  those  idle  factory  operatives 
who  watched  them  from  the  streets.  In 
face  and  build  they  had  the  brand  of  the 
aristocracy  or  the  upper  middle  class. 
Here,  even  here,  where  the  industrial 
crisis  should  have  given  the  lower  class 
an  impulse  to  enlist,  the  upper  class  had 
responded  first  to  the  call. 

Certainly,  the  upper  class  has  seen  its 


THE  BRITISH  CALM  155 

duty,  has  met  the  responsibility  in  its  own 
spirit  of  noblesse  oblige.  England  could 
ask  no  more  of  them  than  they  have  given. 
Yet,  this  class  system  of  which  they  are 
the  flower  forms  now  a  real  perplexity  of 
the  Empire.  The  other  classes  have 
grown  accustomed  to  leave  in  their  hands 
all  the  responsibility  for  affairs.  "  Let 
George  do  it,"  might  have  been  a  motto 
of  the  shopman  and  the  navvy.  Now, 
in  the  crisis  which  none  but  the  upper 
class  fully  expected,  but  which  the  upper 
class  alone  cannot  meet,  the  others  cling 
a  little  to  their  old  attitude. 

When  the  Manchester  operative,  the 
navvy,  the  shopman  and  the  farmer 
realise  their  responsibility,  develop  their 
own  spirit  of  noblesse  oblige  —  then  you 
may  call  England  fully  awake.  And  to 
waken  these  classes,  the  rulers  of  England 
are  sounding  all  the  gongs  of  the  Press. 

The  English  imperturbability — it  has  so 
many  sides  !  I  take  it,  from  testimony 
on  all  hands,  that  as  an  individual  your 
Englishman  is  the  best  fighting  man  out 
there  on  the  line.  The  Belgians  and 
French  admit  it  openly,  and  the  Germans 


156    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

tacitly.  He  was  made  for  this  kind  of 
warfare,  wherein  endurance  of  nerves 
under  days  and  days  of  strain  from  noise 
and  battering  count  more  than  dashing 
courage. 

Of  course,  he  is  a  professional  or  a 
volunteer,  and  therefore  a  natural  fighter, 
while  the  others  are  conscripts,  with  the 
fighting  men  and  the  peace  men  all  mixed 
up.  But  that  doesn't  wholly  account  for 
it.  The  answer  is  this  quality  of  self-con- 
trol, this  ability  to  shut  his  imagination, 
this  imperturbability.  That  is  why  he  gets 
such  comfort  as  he  may  out  of  life  in  the 
trenches,  why  he  manages  to  maintain,  in 
the  midst  of  war,  some  of  his  fastidious 
personal  habits,  why,  after  a  week  under 
fire,  he  takes  a  sleep  and  a  wash-up,  and 
falls  to  playing  football  as  though  he 
were  in  camp  at  Aldershot. 

Say  what  Kipling  may  of  the  flannelled 
fool  or  the  muddied  oaf,  his  lifelong 
training  in  sport,  with  the  physique  and 
discipline  of  the  spirit  which  sport  implies, 
serves  him  well  on  the  line.  The  sports 
he  has  played  have  given  him  the  quality 
of  pluck  for  this  greatest  of  all  sports. 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          157 

If  he  is,  as  the  British  think,  the  best 
bayonet  man  on  the  line,  it  is  because 
bayonet  work  amounts  to  a  straight  con- 
test between  two  athletes ;  the  best- 
trained  muscles,  the  best  athletic  spirit, 
wins.  And  he  has  that. 

It  grated  upon  us  Americans,  some- 
times, to  come  from  stricken  Brussels 
or  Paris  and  see  so  many  things  running 
at  their  usual  pace  in  London  ;  to  find  the 
cafes  open,  the  inhabitants  dressing  for 
dinner,  the  theatres  running.  I  heard  a 
large  concert-hall  audience,  on  the  night 
after  Antwerp  fell,  laughing  at  jokes 
about  the  war ;  and,  fresh  from  mourning 
Paris,  I  liked  it  but  little. 

It  offended  not  only  us  neutral  observers, 
but  also  certain  serious  spirits  among  the 
English,  to  see  that  neither  Press  nor 
pulpit  could  turn  the  British  popular 
interest  in  football  toward  interest  in  the 
nobler  task.  I  came  to  look  upon  all 
this,  in  time,  as  a  mere  defect  of  British 
qualities.  Why,  after  all,  should  the 
Briton  stop  anything  he  wants  to  do,  in 
order  to  mourn  over  the  crisis  of  the 
Empire  ?  What's  the  good  in  it  ?  When 


158     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

the  time  comes  to  fight,  why,  he'll  fight. 
At  present — there's  a  new  play  at  the 
Savoy. 

The  finer  spirits  of  the  Empire  do  not 
take  it  in  that  spirit ;  but  they  are  not 
airing  their  feelings  publicly.  An  Ameri- 
can editor  who  visited  London  to  get 
manuscripts  found  that  there  were  few 
to  be  had.  The  great,  popular  British 
authors  simply  were  not  writing ;  they 
couldn't.  The  day  after  Antwerp  fell 
many  city  business  men  failed  to  show 
up  at  their  offices  ;  they  were  in  no  mood 
to  face  commonplaces.  These,  however, 
are  "  upper  class  "  people,  in  our  sense  if 
not  in  the  English  sense,  and  the  upper 
class  is  awake.  It  is  the  populace  which 
gives  the  appearance,  at  least,  of  serenity. 

All  classes  alike,  they  meet  their  personal 
crises  in  this  war  with  that  same  imper- 
turbable spirit.  "  Father,"  said  a  young 
city  man  at  breakfast  one  morning,  "  I've 
gone  into  the  London  Scottish."  "  Bob," 
said  his  father,  "it's  time  !  "  An  elderly 
Englishman  was  concerning  himself  with 
a  regiment  of  home  guards.  His  chauffeur, 
a  blank-faced,  mechanical  English  servant, 


THE  BRITISH  CALM  159 

drove  him  back  from  the  grounds  one  day. 
"  Sorry,  sir,  but  I  must  leave  to-morrow," 
said  the  chauffeur  as  they  drew  up  at  the 
door.  "I'm  going  with  the  Lancers." 
That  was  his  first  hint,  even  to  his  fellow 
servants,  of  military  intentions. 

I  had  been  talking  over  the  business 
situation  with  a  highly-intelligent,  highly- 
likable  young  city  man.  At  the  end  of  our 
last  session  he  told  me  that  his  secretary 
would  give  me  any  more  facts  I  wanted ; 
he  was  going  out  of  town.  It  was  his 
secretary  who  informed  me  that  "  out  of 
town  "  meant  the  Front. 

A  reporter  called  on  a  British  author, 
one  of  the  Names.  As  they  talked,  the 
butler  brought  a  telegram.  The  author 
read  it ;  he  handed  it  to  the  reporter.  His 
nephew  had  been  killed  in  action.  The 
author  passed  his  hand  over  his  eyes. 

"  We're  a  military  family,"  he  said. 
"  That's  the  second.  You  were  asking — " 

I  have  watched,  here  and  there,  the 
leave-takings.  When  a  regiment  goes  to 
the  Front  there  are  no  relatives  to  see 
them  off ;  secrecy,  dense  and  unfathom- 
able, shrouds  the  whole  military  game  as 


160    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

played  now  in  Great  Britain ;  the  leave- 
taking  is  done  at  home.  But  there  are 
exceptions  now  and  then.  I  sailed  from 
Folkestone,  en  route  to  Brussels,  in  the 
early  days  of  the  war.  I  found  aboard  a 
Red  Cross  detachment,  a  group  of  British 
officers,  and  an  army  chaplain  or  so ; 
their  women,  fine,  tall  Barbarians  of 
charm  and  breeding,  had  managed  by 
favour  to  go  down  to  the  boat  with  them. 
I  should  not  describe  the  good-bye  em- 
braces of  these  women  as  cold,  there  was 
a  suggestion  of  fire  underneath ;  but  at 
least  they  seemed  casual.  You  knew 
that,  once  alone,  they  would  cry  their 
eyes  out,  but  not  there,  where  the  situation 
called  for  a  stiff  upper  lip.  The  officers, 
the  Red  Cross  Corps  and  the  chaplains 
waved  at  their  women  until  we  rounded 
the  Folkestone  pier  head.  Then,  just  for 
a  second,  one  of  the  chaplains  opened 
his  mind  to  me. 

"It's  taking  your  life  into  your  hands, 
isn't  it  ?  "  he  said.  "  And  I  suppose  they 
know  it ! J: 

I  sat  in  a  cafe  in  Havre,  when  that  city 
was  an  English  base,  beside  an  English 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          161 

officer  and  his  mother.  I  confess  that  I 
eavesdropped  shamefully.  She  had  some 
"  pull,"  I  suspect ;  someone,  for  sake  of 
her  mother  heart,  had  rent  the  fog  of  war 
long  enough  to  let  her  know  that  her  boy 
would  be  a  few  days  at  Havre.  They 
were  to  part  there,  at  the  cafe  ;  he  must 
go  back  at  six  o'clock  to  quarters,  and  in 
the  morning  to  the  Front.  They  chatted 
of  the  dog  and  the  automobile  and  the 
neighbours  ;  he  got  out  a  war  map  and 
tried  to  explain  the  situation.  I  doubt  if 
she  took  in  a  word  of  that ;  her  eyes  were 
devouring  his  face  as  he  looked  down  at 
the  map.  I  was  not  shameless  enough  to 
watch  them  as  they  parted  ;  but  I  heard 
him  say,  in  almost  his  ordinary  tone  : 

"  Good-bye,  Mumsey — it  will  soon  be 
over  !  )! 

And  she  said  : 

"  Be  home  for  Christmas  !  }!  No  more 
but  that.  They  can  do  it,  these  English  ! 

The  very  losses  they  take  with  that 
appearance  of  the  casual  spirit.  I  went 
down  to  Rouen  with  a  young  English 
scholar  half-crippled  by  an  old  hunting 
accident  which  kept  him  out  of  the  ranks. 

M 


162     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

He  was  going  to  see  a  wounded  brother, 
and  also  to  find  if  the  army  wouldn't 
have  him  as  interpreter.  Toward  the 
end  of  a  short  but  rather  intimate 
acquaintance,  I  mentioned  the  losses. 
"  Two  in  our  family — dead,"  said  he. 
The  news  about  one,  a  brother,  had  come 
only  two  days  before.  And  if  I  had 
not  begun  to  understand  the  English,  I 
should  have  called  his  tone  cheerful. 

I  associated  for  two  months,  off  and  on, 
with  a  certain  middle-aged  Englishman, 
and  never  learned  from  him  that  he  had 
lost  two  relatives  in  the  early  campaign. 
I  knew  it  only  from  his  mourning,  and 
from  his  friends. 

The  French  in  their  wonderful  exaltation 
of  heroism  take  pride  in  assuming  this 
attitude  ;  but  they  assume  it  with  much 
struggle  of  the  soul,  I  think.  That  control 
of  the  English,  however,  comes  naturally. 
It  is  not  lack  of  feeling ;  it  is  feeling  so 
deep  that  it  calls  out  the  strongest  thing 
in  them — their  self-control. 

That  imperturbability  of  the  English, 
that  failure  to  act  as  though  they 
recognised  the  invidious  and  the  dis- 


THE  BRITISH  CALM          163 

agreeable — it  is  their  weakness  in  Arma- 
geddon. It  was  unthinkable  to  them  that 
Germany  should  ever  go  to  war  with  them  ; 
it  was  unthinkable  that  any  nation  could 
make  headway  against  England  while  the 
navy  held  the  coast. 

By  vice  of  their  imperturbability  they 
entered  the  war  of  the  nations  unprepared  ; 
by  vice  of  it  they  muddled  their  early 
preparations  ;  by  vice  of  it,  they  failed 
to  prepare  the  national  mind  for  a  supreme 
struggle  ;  by  vice  of  it,  recruiting  has  gone 
all  too  slowly.  If  they  lose,  if  their  Empire 
fall,  it  will  be  by  vice  of  this  quality. 

Yet  it  is  this  imperturbability  which 
prevents  them,  now,  from  anything  like 
panic  over  the  danger  ;  which  has  enabled 
them  to  work  system  and  efficiency  out  of 
a  muddled  beginning ;  which  makes  even 
their  raw  troops  behave  like  veterans  on 
that  nerve-racking  line  ;  which  turns  every 
threat  of  Germany  into  a  prop  for  the 
national  backbone  ;  which,  should  invasion 
come,  will  keep  them  fighting  when  any 
other  people  would  have  resigned  them- 
selves. If  they  win,  if  their  Empire 
survive,  it  will  be  by  virtue  of  this  quality. 

M  2 


VI 

THE   SPLENDID   STORY   OF  YPRES 
February,  1915 

IN  a  parliamentary  debate  held  during 
February  the  Opposition  expressed  a  strong 
hope  that  members  of  the  Press  might 
have  access  to  the  British  lines,  in  order 
that  the  public  might  know  about  the 
"  Battle  of  Ypres  "  and  the  glorious  feats 
of  British  arms  thereat  performed.  To 
many,  to  most,  of  the  English  this  was 
the  first  news  that  any  part  of  the  great, 
continuous  battle  along  the  French  border 
had  been  divided  by  anyone  into  battles 
or  minor  engagements.  They  knew,  this 
British  public,  that  there  had  been  great 
feats  of  arms  in  and  about  the  old  capital 
of  French  Flanders ;  they  knew  that 
Britain  had  become  dark  with  mourning 
for  the  men  lost  in  those  trying  days  ; 
they  knew  that  somehow  since  November 


104 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  165 

Germany  was  a  nation  besieged  by  land 
and  water,  a  nation  fighting  a  defensive 
battle ;  they  did  not  know  the  cause. 
The  immensity  of  this  war ;  the  veil 
drawn  by  military  censorship  ;  the  very 
novelty  of  military  science  brought  about 
by  new  servants  of  death,  such  as  the 
aeroplane,  have  so  confused  the  situation, 
so  muddled  the  public  mind,  that  even  the 
military  experts  at  home  have  only  begun 
to  realise  that  a  great,  decisive  action, 
separate  from  the  rest  of  the  war  in  its 
character  and  consequences,  occurred  on 
the  line  between  La  Bassee  and  the  sea 
in  October  and  November  of  1914. 

A  decisive  action — perhaps  the  really 
decisive  action  of  the  war.  Indeed,  when 
history  runs  a  thread  through  the  con- 
fusions and  obscurities  of  Armageddon, 
historians  may  call  it  the  most  vital  battle 
in  the  annals  of  the  island  people.  Not 
Crecy  nor  Blenheim  nor  Waterloo  seems 
now  more  important.  For  it  closed  the 
last  gap  in  the  combined  defensive-offensive 
operations  of  the  Western  Allies.  It  made 
impossible— short  of  an  utter  collapse  of 
the  Allied  Armies — any  further  German 


166     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

move  on  Paris  or  any  move  to  take  the 
French  in  the  rear.  Most  importantly 
to  England,  it  sealed  the  road  to  Calais, 
that  vital,  critical  port  within  eyesight 
of  the  English  coast.  Further,  more  Eng- 
lish troops  were  engaged  here  than  in  any 
previous  battle  of  the  Empire,  more 
Germans  than  in  the  whole  Franco-Prus- 
sian War — a  hundred  and  twenty  thousand 
English  against  six  hundred  thousand 
Germans.  Yet  one  thinks  of  the  English 
force,  and  rightly,  as  a  "  little  "  army  in 
this  war  of  unprecedented  numbers  ;  it 
seems,  in  its  relation  to  the  whole  picture, 
like  one  of  those  brigades  which  won 
immortal  glory  in  old  wars  by  holding  a 
crucial  point  on  the  battle-line. 

Up  to  that  brief  breathing-spell  when 
the  British  army  shifted  from  its  position 
on  the  Aisne  to  its  new  fighting-ground 
on  the  Western  front,  it  had  been  engaged 
every  day  for  seven  weeks.  There  had 
been  the  attack  at  Mons,  when  its  force, 
equivalent  in  numbers  to  two  army  corps, 
found  themselves  attacked  by  four  German 
corps  and  outflanked  on  the  left  by  another. 
There  followed  four  days  of  a  backward 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  167 

fight  which  every  surviving  Tommy  of 
the  British  Expeditionary  Force  remembers 
only  as  a  confused  kind  of  hell.  By  night 
they  dropped  on  their  faces  to  wake  to 
the  sound  of  guns,  to  the  bursting  of 
shells,  to  more  marching,  more  action. 
By  day  the  massed  German  lines  poured 
in  on  them  four  deep.  Rank  after  rank 
the  British  mowed  them  down  until  the 
riflemen  and  machine-gun  men  retreated 
from  very  weariness  of  arm  and  horror 
of  more  killing. 

There  came  after  four  days  a  little 
respite,  during  which  the  British,  for 
strategic  reasons,  continued  their  retreat, 
fighting  only  rearguard  actions.  There 
came,  too,  a  change  in  the  spirit  of  Tommy 
Atkins.  This  was  a  professional  army  and 
a  veteran  army — the  only  one  on  the  line, 
else  the  history  of  September,  1914,  might 
have  to  be  written  in  other  terms.  Though 
splendidly  equipped,  trained  to  the  minute, 
educated  to  the  last  frill  in  military 
science,  the  others — except  for  a  few  di- 
visions of  the  French — knew  only  the 
theoretical  warfare  of  blank  cartridges. 
The  greater  part  of  the  British  had  faced 


168     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

ball      cartridges     in      India     or      South 
Africa. 

They  had  the  spirit  of  veterans.  And 
like  veterans  they  resented  a  runaway 
fight.  They  began  to  murmur — not  over 
the  dead  left  for  the  Germans  to  bury 
nor  the  wounded  which  choked  the  hospi- 
tals of  Paris,  nor  their  own  prospect  of 
annihilation,  but  against  this  kind  of 
warfare  which  never  let  them  stand  and 
fight.  Here  it  was  that  Field-Marshal 
Sir  John  French  went  among  his  troops, 
refusing  to  let  them  rise  and  salute  ;  as 
they  rested  by  the  roadside  he  sat  down 
with  them,  told  them  that  if  they  would 
keep  it  up  just  a  little  longer  he  would 
promise  them  a  fight.  The  muttering 
died  down,  the  Army  went  on — backward. 
Again  the  Germans  pressed  them  ;  again 
there  was  the  ruthless,  mechanical 
slaughter  of  charging,  tight-locked  lines, 
the  ghastly  mowing  of  machine-guns,  the 
tragedies  of  bursting  shells. 

It  was  the  night  of  September  6  now  ; 
the  British  army  in  its  southward  retreat 
had  passed  inside  of  Paris  ;  it  halted  to 
the  south-east  of  the  French  capital  and 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  169 

made  another  stand.  The  blackness  of 
despair  lay  that  night  over  the  leaders  of 
the  British  Army.  Some  of  the  Staff 
officers  have  admitted  since  that  they 
saw  no  way  out ;  they  hoped  only  to  find 
a  good  position  for  a  last  stand,  and  to 
make  the  massacre  cost  the  Germans  as 
dearly  as  possible. 

Sir  John  French  and  his  corps  com- 
manders, clean  fagged  out,  turned  in  for 
a  little  sleep.  At  midnight  a  courier  from 
the  line  wakened  them.  He  was  pale 
and  shaken.  The  German  force  to  the 
north  had  got  in  touch  with  a  new  German 
force  which  had  appeared  from  the  east. 
They  were  cut  off  from  the  French  Army  ; 
the  jig  was  up.  Sir  John  French  and  his 
two  corps  commanders  in  summary  attire, 
just  as  they  were  roused  from  their  beds, 
held  a  council  by  the  light  of  a  smoking 
country  lamp.  French  invented  a  way 
to  meet  the  new  movement,  ordered  dis- 
positions accordingly,  and  went  back  to 
bed.  That  council  of  war  on  the  eve  of 
September  7,  1914,  one  of  the  great  days 
in  the  history  of  the  world,  will  furnish 
no  theme  for  the  battle  painter  of  the 


170    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

future  who  loves  to  trick  out  his  historic 
figures  in  gilt  and  gold  lace  ! 

And  in  the  morning  French,  who,  it 
is  said,  has  an  uncanny  sense  for  the  mind 
of  his  enemy,  felt  a  slackening  of  the 
attack  on  his  front.  Before  the  sun  was 
high  his  aeroplanes  had  reported  that 
Von  Kluck,  at  his  front,  had  faced  east 
and  was  moving  away  from  Paris.  French 
struck  with  all  his  force.  The  French 
Army  of  Paris  made  their  famous  taxicab 
movement  and  struck  also.  By  night 
the  German  movement  was  not  a  shift 
but  a  full  retreat. 

We  know  now  the  German  plan  of  cam- 
paign and  have  a  better  understanding 
of  this  whole  action  at  the  Marne.  That 
great  Western  Army  of  Von  Kluck  which 
had  swept  through  Belgium,  broken  across 
the  unfortified  French  frontier,  and  thrust 
forward  its  cavalry  outposts  until  the 
Parisian  fire  department  buried  Uhlans 
within  the  city  limits — it  was  never 
intended  that  this  army  should  take  Paris. 
That  honour  was  for  the  Crown  Prince, 
who  was  coming  through  Rheims  from  the 
north-east.  Von  Kluck  was  to  dispose 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  171 

thoroughly  of  the  French  and  British  at 
his  front,  to  shift  to  the  left  and  join 
the  Prince's  army  at  a  point  between 
Rheims  and  Paris.  Then,  down  the  ex- 
cellent Rheims-Paris  roads,  they  would 
march  together  to  the  investment  of  the 
French  capital. 

But  somewhere  along  the  line  Von  Kluck 
made  his  mistake  —  he  underrated  the 
enemy.  In  the  original  French  plan  of 
concentration,  the  extreme  left  under 
General  Manoury  was  to  mobilise  at 
Amiens,  up  toward  the  Belgian  border. 
That  mobilisation  was  never  completed — 
the  Germans  came  on  too  fast.  Manoury's 
army  fell  back  to  the  South  and  West, 
where  quietly,  and  utterly  unknown  to  the 
Germans,  it  completed  its  mobilisation. 
When  the  time  came  to  execute  the  great 
general  plan,  Manoury  struck  first,  on  Von 
Kluck's  right  flank.  He  turned,  he  started 
prematurely  eastward,  presenting  his  flank 
in  turn  to  the  British  and  the  army  of  Paris. 

Sir  John  French  struck  ;  the  Army  of 
Paris  struck  ;  more  importantly,  the  whole 
French  line  from  Switzerland  to  Paris 
pivoted  on  the  Vosges,  moved  up  its 


172     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

reserve  line  and  initiated  a  general  attack. 
The  new  attack  took  the  Crown  Prince 
on  his  front  and  his  left  flank.  Von 
Kluck  fell  back  faster  and  faster ;  it  was 
all  but  annihilation  for  him.  The  Crown 
Prince  and  his  supporting  armies  to  right 
and  left  fell  back.  The  withdrawal  be- 
came a  retreat. 

That  was  the  great  day  for  France— 
that  September  7.  England's  greatest  day 
was  yet  to  come ;  the  British  after  all, 
were  only  two  corps  out  of  thirty.  That 
day,  from  the  Vosges  to  Paris,  Northern 
France  was  a  heaven  of  glory  and  a  hell 
of  slaughter.  That  day  regiments  and 
battalions  did  the  heroically  impossible 
in  such  numbers  that  no  special  mentions, 
no  war  reports,  no  decorations,  can  ever 
recognise  or  name  them.  That  day  a 
whole  population  of  France's  fairest  pro- 
vinces cowered  and  ran  or  stood  and  died. 
That  day  the  transports  of  wounded  choked 
every  back  trail,  the  dead  sprinkled  every 
forest,  in  northern  France.  No  one  will 
ever  tell  the  full  story.  It  would  be  like 
trying  to  write  the  history  of  a  nation  by 
telling  the  full  life-story  of  every  individual 
in  the  nation.  But  this  war,  whatever 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  173 

account  it  holds  against  the  future,  can 
never  know  another  day  so  significant 
to  France.  Its  infinite  agonies  were  the 
birthpains  of  a  new  France.  From  it 
emerged  the  transformed  French  warrior ; 
not  emotional  but  stolid,  not  mercurial 
but  determined ;  above  all,  a  warrior 
recovered  from  his  old  back-thought,  his 
old,  hidden  fear  of  the  Prussian  superman. 
This,  however,  is  the  story  of  the  British 
Army  ;  it  must  ignore  that  series  of  actions 
"from  the  Vosges  to  Soissons  wherein  the 
French  locked  the  line  for  four  hundred 
miles  against  the  German  counter-attacks 
and  fenced  the  enemy  off  from  the  fort- 
ress of  Verdun — "  ten  Waterloos  a  week  " 
someone  has  called  it.  After  two  days 
of  uninterrupted  rearguard  fighting  the 
Germans  made  their  stand  at  the  Aisne. 
A  series  of  actions  more  or  less  severe 
proved  that  neither  the  British  nor  the 
French  to  right  and  left  could  make 
present  headway  against  the  strong  Ger- 
man entrenchments.  From  the  Vosges 
to  Lille  the  line  locked  tight ;  it  was  no 
longer  open  warfare  :  it  was  a  siege.  As 
Sir  John  French's  despatches  show,  the 
British  felt  the  German  resistance  settling 


174     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

down  to  defensive  tactics.  The  part  of 
the  line  running  to  right  and  left  of 
Soissons  became  no  longer  important. 

But  there  was  fighting  of  sorts  to  do  far 
to  the  left,  and  early  in  October  the  whole 
British  Army  yielded  its  trenches  to  the 
French  reserves  and  moved  over  toward 
Calais.  It  was  their  first  relief  from  con- 
tinuous battle.  The  Army,  I  believe,  has 
discovered  a  genius  in  Major-General  Rob- 
ertson, who  had  charge  of  transportation 
and  commissary.  So  expeditiously  did 
he  work,  and  yet  so  quietly,  that  the 
first  German  officers  whom  the  British 
took  prisoners  expressed  surprise  not  so 
much  at  their  capture  as  to  the  identity 
of  their  captors.  "  We  thought  we  were 
fighting  the  French  Territorials,"  they 
said. 

To  understand  why  the  subsequent 
operations  became  so  vital  to  the  whole 
campaign,  you  must  understand  the  situa- 
tion on  October  11,  when  the  British 
re-established  touch  with  the  enemy  ;  it 
is  a  matter  of  recapitulating  old  history 
in  a  new  light.  The  Allied  line  reached 
to  Lille,  fifty  miles  from  the  sea,  and  near 
the  Belgian  border.  On  this  end  of  the 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  175 

line,  Allies  and  Germans  alike,  first  one 
and  then  the  other,  had  been  outflanking 
—ringing  each  other  with  artillery  and 
earthworks  like  one  of  those  representations 
of  the  mountain  chains  which  we  used  to 
draw  in  our  school  maps.  That  line  was 
lengthening  northward  and  westward  day 
by  day.  But  the  fifty  miles  from  Lille 
to  the  sea  lay  open.  This  gap  commanded 
the  routes  to  Dunkirk,  to  Calais,  to  Bou- 
logne— to  all  the  important  French  Channel 
ports.  It  commanded  also  an  easy  and 
most  accommodating  route  to  Paris.  If 
the  Germans  left  open  that  gap,  it  was 
because  the  fortress  of  Antwerp  still 
menaced  their  western  line  of  communi- 
cations. But  on  October  8  Antwerp  fell 
—fell  so  suddenly  that  a  division  of  British 
troops  under  General  Rawlinson,  sent  to 
assist  the  Belgians  in  holding  the  outer 
defences,  did  not  arrive  until  the  Germans 
had  gained  ground  to  emplace  their  42-centi- 
metre siege  howitzers  and  had  made  further 
defence  of  the  fortress  a  mere  technicality. 
Rawlinson's  division  advanced,  joined 
what  remained  of  the  Belgian  Army,  and 
retreated  with  them  down  the  coast  past 
Zeebrugge,  past  Ostend.  The  Belgians 


176    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

took  up  a  final  position  at  the  river  Yser, 
where  they  stood  to  defend  the  last  sliver 
of  their  territory.  Rawlinson,  roughly 
joining  forces  with  them  on  their  right, 
extended  his  lines  towards  Ypres. 

At  about  this  period  the  French  com- 
munique lifted  for  a  moment  the  veil 
over  these  serious  operations,  so  vital 
to  the  whole  war ;  and  the  glimpse  sent 
a  chill  through  Paris.  "  Dense  masses 
of  cavalry,"  it  reported,  "  have  appeared 
on  the  Tourcoing-Armentieres  road,  screen- 
ing an  important  new  force  of  the  enemy." 
This  was  the  immediate  bid  of  Germany  to 
pour  through  that  gap.  The  French,  out- 
flanked, retired  the  left  of  their  line  from 
before  Lille  to  the  town  of  La  Bassee. 
The  Germans  took  La  Bassee ;  on  the 
heights  before  that  hamlet,  grown  suddenly 
important  in  history,  the  French  made  a 
stand  and  dug  in. 

The  gap  between  La  Bassee  and  the 
sea  remained,  to  all  military  intents  and 
purposes,  open  and  dangerous.  The  Allies 
plugged  it  by  various  devices,  as  an 
engineer  builds  a  dam  of  earth  before  he 
prepares  his  steel  locks.  They  over- 
stretched the  line  of  the  Belgians.  They 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  177 

threw  in  the  French  Territorials — men  in 
their  forties,  and  therefore  by  mental  and 
physical  condition  inferior  as  soldiers 
to  the  young,  perfectly  trained  first-line 
troops.  The  heavier  masses  of  the  German 
advance  were  not  yet  upon  the  Allied  line  ; 
so  it  did  not  break,  but  it  bulged  terribly  ; 
the  campaign  at  this  point  became  a 
backward  fight.  The  long  battle  on  the 
western  front  was  now  like  a  rubber 
bladder  with  a  weak  spot.  Blow  it  up 
and  the  bladder  bulges  at  that  spot. 
Blow  it  a  little  further  and  the  bladder 
breaks  at  that  spot. 

The  breaking-point  was  near  when,  on 
October  11,  the  first  of  the  main  British 
force  detrained  at  St.  Omer.  Not  only 
the  German  outposts  but  even  strong 
forces  of  the  main  body  had  reached  in 
some  places  as  far  south  as  a  line  drawn 
from  Calais  parallel  with  the  Great  Line. 
The  Belgians  and  the  French  Territorials 
resisted  with  what  force  they  had  ;  but 
their  resistance  grew  irregular.  "  It's 
guerilla  warfare,  that's  what  it  is,"  reported 
a  "  sniping  "  Canadian  correspondent  who, 
in  early  October,  got  out  to  the  lines  and 
miraculously  returned  to  Calais  unarrested. 

N 


178     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

The  English  Army  found  its  task  cut 
out  for  it.  They  must  drive  the  advanced 
German  forces  back  to  a  line  already 
established  in  the  minds  of  their  strategists 
— to  complete  that  all- important  operation 
of  closing  the  siege  of  Germany.  They 
must  keep  in  touch  with  the  French  at 
La  Bassee ;  they  must  establish  touch 
with  the  Belgians  and  Rawlinson's  division 
on  the  west.  General  Sir  Horace  Smith- 
Dorrien's  Second  Corps,  detraining  at  St. 
Omer  on  the  llth,  went  immediately 
into  action  at  the  toughest  point  in  the 
whole  campaign — La  Bass6e.  That  village 
held  out  against  every  attack — it  is  holding 
still.  It  became,  as  the  campaign  went 
on,  only  a  pivot  from  which  the  English 
forces  turned  the  Germans  back  from 
France  and  Flanders.  For  a  week  the 
successive  British  detachments  were  de- 
training and  going  forward  at  once  to 
fight  and  to  die.  By  the  19th  the  whole 
Army  was  fighting  a  scattering,  confused- 
looking  battle  whose  focus  was  Ypres,  the 
beautiful  old  capital  of  French  Flanders. 
By  that  time,  also,  the  Belgian  Army, 
which  had  been  given  a  brief  breathing- 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  179 

spell  by  the  Germans,  was  desperately 
engaged  in  holding  the  Yser  at  the  point 
of  the  line  nearest  the  sea.  The  bridge- 
head of  the  Yser,  the  critical  point  for 
them,  had  been  lost  and  won  again ; 
falling  back  on  the  immemorial  defensive 
measure  of  the  Flemish,  the  Belgians  had 
flooded  the  country ;  the  extreme  left 
of  the  line  was  secure. 

Rawlinson,  stretching  his  lines  beyond 
all  security,  was  fighting  a  desperate  battle 
to  hold  Ypres  and  to  maintain  touch  with 
the  Belgians  and  their  French  reinforce- 
ments to  his  left.  By  the  20th  that  line 
had  grown  perilously  thin  ;  by  the  20th, 
too,  the  German  masses  were  coming  on 
faster  and  faster  ;  and  they  were  beginning 
to  strike  at  his  weakest  spot — his  touch 
with  the  French  and  Belgians  to  his  left. 

Meantime,  Sir  John  French,  even  before 
the  whole  Army  was  detrained,  had  swung 
his  main  forces  through  a  series  of  man- 
oeuvres which  the  soldier  of  the  future 
may  study  for  their  brilliance  and  for 
their  defiance  of  military  tradition.  Visitors 
returning  to  London  in  October  described 
General  Headquarters  and  the  town  which 

N  2 


180    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

surrounded  it  as  "  the  quietest  spot  in 
Europe."  Though  the  guns  sounded 
everywhere  in  the  distance,  peasants  were 
ploughing,  boys  going  fishing,  housewives 
scrubbing  the  doorsteps  just  as  usual. 
Heart  of  the  town  and  hope  of  the  Empire 
was  that  house  where  this  small,  compact, 
blue-eyed  man  with  his  mixture  of  French 
and  Irish  blood  which  means  genius,  his 
overlay  of  English  blood  which  means 
stability,  this  old  beau  sabreur  transformed 
by  the  change  of  warfare  to  a  thinking 
machine,  was  solving  a  situation  which 
was  like  twenty  chess  problems  at  once. 
Of  mornings  he  worked  at  his  desk  ;  of 
afternoons  he  held  council  or  visited  the 
lines  ;  at  luncheon,  at  tea,  at  dinner,  he 
thrashed  it  out  with  his  officers.  "  He 
violated,"  says  a  friendly  critic,  "  every 
rule  of  warfare — and  succeeded."  They 
were  judicious  violations.  This  is  a  new 
warfare  ;  some  of  the  old  rules  do  not  hold. 
He  was  making  the  traditions  of  a  new 
warfare. 

So  complex  is  this  new  warfare  that  a 
layman  cannot  follow  the  separate  actions 
which  made  the  great  result.  Indeed, 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  181 

French's  own  despatches,  written  at  a 
time  when  he  must  conceal  much  from  the 
enemy,  fail  to  describe  these  actions  in 
any  detail.  Every  day  he  let  loose  a 
separate  hell  against  the  increasing  German 
hordes  at  his  front.  French  was  bending 
all  these  complex  things  to  one  end — to 
make  untenable  any  German  position 
below  the  line  drawn  across  Flanders  and 
northern  France  by  the  strategists  of 
the  Allies.  In  all  this  torn,  bleeding 
province  of  fire  and  death  the  action  rose 
to  separate  battles  which  would  have 
been  famous  in  old  wars.  The  soixante- 
quinze  guns  of  the  French  artillery  support, 
the  rifles  and  bayonets  of  the  British 
Third  Corps,  took  the  hill  of  Mont  des 
Cats ;  did  it,  too,  against  odds.  That 
same  Third  Corps — always  the  attacking 
force,  and  almost  always  against  odds — 
went  forward  in  a  week  to  Armentieres, 
a  gain  of  twenty  miles  or  more.  The 
Second  Corps,  fighting  on  the  right  of  the 
Third,  made  a  narrower  turn.  It  pivoted 
on  La  Bassee  ;  its  left  went  forward  ten 
miles  to  a  point  where  it  was  in  touch 
with  the  Third. 


182     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

So  as  the  critical  20th  approached  the 
main  force  under  Sir  John  French  extended 
for  some  twenty-five  miles  from  before 
La  Bassee  to  a  point  beyond  Ypres ; 
and  now  the  German  resistance  stiffened 
and  held.  Neither  the  English  nor  the 
French  could  drive  much  farther.  But  the 
line  was  established.  And  it  was  a  straight 
line.  Half-formed,  insecure,  it  still  reached 
out  and  touched  that  Franco-Belgian  de- 
fence which  ran  from  the  Forest  of  Hout- 
hulst  to  the  sea. 

That  extreme  left  of  the  British  line— 
the  point  where  it  joined  the  line  of  its 
Allies — was  held  by  Rawlinson's  harassed, 
overstretched  division.  What  that  im- 
mortal Seventh  Division  endured  then  and 
thereafter  is  a  separate  story.  And  just 
then  more  Germans  and  still  more  Germans 
were  rushed  down  the  Belgian  railroads. 
"  They  seemed  to  rain  on  us  everywhere," 
a  spectator  has  said  ;  but  most  of  all  they 
rained  on  that  weak  point  to  the  left. 

Now  French,  "  violating  every  rule  of 
war,"  had  not  only  drawn  the  lines  of  his 
important  Second  and  Third  Corps  very 
thin  but  he  had  shot  his  last  bolt  of  reserves. 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  183 

All  the  reinforcements  available  from  Eng- 
land had  been  used  up  in  filling  out  units 
—this  purely  intellectual  summary  has 
taken  no  account  of  the  heavy  cost  in 
life  and  limb  of  these  British  attacks. 
The  Indian  troops,  hurried  up  from  Mar- 
seilles, had  been  rushed  to  the  Front. 
The  day  when  they  arrived  the  British 
forces  were  hanging  on  by  their  eyelids. 
Someone,  I  am  told,  looked  back  from  a 
trench  and  saw  a  solitary  outpost,  a 
turbaned,  cloaked  figure  of  the  desert, 
very  startling  in  the  green,  peaceful  French 
landscape,  riding  over  a  hill.  Behind 
him  nodded  the  turbans  of  Sikh  Cavalry  ; 
and  the  English  in  the  trenches,  who 
seemed  past  emotion,  waved  their  rifle 
barrels  and  cheered.  But  neither  Indians, 
nor  French  Territorials,  nor  French  Cavalry, 
nor  French  Artillery  seemed  sufficient. 

Only  the  First  Corps  remained  out  of 
action.  An  army  does  not  move  in  a 
day ;  while  the  Second  Corps  and  the 
Third  had  been  battering  their  way  through 
a  twenty-five  mile  advance,  the  First,  under 
General  Sir  Douglas  Haig,  was  still  coming 
over  from  its  old  position  before  Soissons. 


184     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

By  the  20th  they  were  detrained  and  ready 
for  the  line. 

There  came  that  night  a  special  moment 
of  decision  for  Sir  John  French  ;  and  on 
his  decision  perhaps  rested  the  fate  of 
the  campaign.  He  himself  has  stated  it 
undramatically  in  his  despatches.  Should 
he  use  the  First  to  reinforce  the  Second 
and  Third,  thereby  securing  the  ground 
already  won  on  the  right  ?  They  were 
drawn  thin,  the  Second  and  Third — thin. 
One  day,  it  is  said,  French,  visiting  the 
lines,  talked  to  a  colonel  who  was  hard 
pressed.  '  We  can't  hold  out  much  longer, 
sir,"  said  the  colonel.  "  It  is  impos- 
sible !  ''  "I  want  only  men  who  can  do 
the  impossible,"  said  French.  "  Hold  !  " 

The  Second  and  Third  were  doing  the 
impossible.  If  any  military  force  since 
wars  began  ever  needed  reinforcements 
it  was  this  one.  But  there  was  the  threat 
beyond  Ypres  at  the  point  between  the 
English  left  and  the  Franco-Belgian  right — 
a  place  where  the  weak  spot  in  the  bladder 
might  bulge  and,  bulging  too  much,  break. 
Sir  John  French,  "  with  the  air,"  someone 
has  said,  "  of  a  business  man  closing  a 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  185 

deal,"  made  his  decision  and  turned  in 
for  a  little  sleep.  He  chose  to  let  the 
Second  Corps  and  the  Third  continue 
with  the  impossible.  He  sent  the  First 
Corps  to  the  line  about  the  city  which 
has  given  name  to  this  whole  series  of 
actions — Ypres.  Almost  from  the  day 
when  they  reached  the  line  they  became 
the  Iron  Corps  of  the  British  ;  and  their 
Commander,  General  Sir  Douglas  Haig, 
stands  second  only  to  French  in  the  credit 
due  for  winning  the  Battle  of  Ypres. 
They  incorporated  what  was  left  of  Raw- 
linson's  harassed,  weary,  battered  Seventh 
Division ;  they  prepared  to  dig  in  and  to 
hold. 

Ten  days  followed  in  which  nothing 
decisive  happened  and  everything  hap- 
pened. The  Germans  rocked  their  attack 
from  side  to  side,  searching  for  the  weak 
spot.  They  gained  here  ;  they  lost  there  ; 
but  the  line  remained  as  it  had  been 
when  Haig  moved  up  his  First  Corps. 
The  British  held  on,  and  continued  to 
dig  in. 

Then  came  the  31st — the  crucial  day 
for  England.  The  attacks  had  been 


186     MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

growing  stronger ;  across  the  lines  the 
British  heard  the  Germans  singing  as 
though  working  themselves  up,  German 
fashion,  to  a  Berserk  courage  ;  captured 
orders  showed  that  the  Kaiser  had  com- 
manded a  great  assault  which  should  clear 
the  way  to  Calais  and  to  Paris. 

Before  the  sun  was  high  on  that  morning 
of  the  31st  a  British  aviator  vol-planed 
down  to  his  own  line  with  a  wing  damaged 
by  shrapnel.  He  dropped  from  his  seat 
pale  and  shaken.  "  A  close  shave  ?  "  they 
asked.  "  It  isn't  that !  "  he  said,  "  it's 
what  I've  seen — three  corps,  I  tell  you— 
against  our  First !  "  So  he  jerked  out  his 
story.  He  had  seen  the  roads  and  ridges 
like  ant-hills  and  ant-runs  with  men  ; 
he  had  seen  new  batteries  going  into 
position ;  he  had  seen,  far  away,  the 
crawling  grey  serpents  which  were  still 
more  German  regiments  going  to  their 
slaughter.  "  And  we're  so  thin  from  up 
there,"  he  said,  "  and  they're  so  many  !  " 
Hard  on  this  came  hurried  news  to  head- 
quarters from  the  front.  The  German 
artillery  and  a  massed  attack  of  German 
infantry  had  broken  the  First  Division 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  187 

of  the  First  Corps  near  Ypres  ;  the  Divi- 
sion was  going  back  ;  the  French  support 
was  going  back.  "  We  must  have  rein- 
forcements," said  the  message.  "  I  can 
give  you  my  two  sentries  and  my  Head- 
quarters Staff,"  replied  French.  Disaster 
after  disaster  followed.  The  Royal  Scots 
Fusiliers,  remaining  too  long  in  a  hot 
place,  were  for  their  very  valour  cut  off. 
The  Germans  had  found  new  artillery 
positions,  had  shelled  General  Douglas 
Haig's  headquarters.  A  shell  had  burst 
in  the  house.  Haig  was  outside  at  the 
time ;  but  nearly  every  staff  officer  of 
the  First  Corps  was  killed  or  wounded. 
The  army  up  there  was  almost  headless 
—was  fighting  as  individuals  on  primitive 
fighting  instinct. 

A  day's  march  away  from  Ypres  is 
the  ford  where  2,000  years  ago  Caesar 
had  his  close  call  from  the  Nervii.  That 
was  the  battle  where  Caesar,  snatching  a 
shield  from  a  soldier,  himself  plunged 
into  the  thick  of  things  and,  acting  as 
line-officer  and  general  all  at  once,  rallied 
the  Roman  army.  Warfare  has  changed, 
but  manhood  and  leadership  remain  the 


188    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

same.  French  jumped  into  his  motor-car 
and  rushed  to  the  line  of  the  First  Division. 
He  had  not  so  far  to  go  as  he  thought. 
The  line  had  retired  four  miles.  Through 
his  glasses  he  could  see  the  close -locked 
quadruple  ranks  of  German  infantrymen 
attacking  everywhere.  And  everywhere 
the  English  were  fighting  valiantly,  but 
without  method.  They  were  in  it  to 
the  last  man — even  the  regimental  cooks. 
The  officers  of  infantry  and  cavalry  were 
firing  with  the  privates,  their  servants 
loading  spare  rifles  behind  them. 

French,  assisted  by  the  able  Haig,  be- 
came a  Headquarters  Staff  himself.  They 
say  that  he  risked  his  life  twenty  times 
that  afternoon,  as  his  motor-car  took  him 
from  focus  of  trouble  to  focus  of  more 
trouble.  He  gave  an  order  here ;  he 
encouraged  an  officer  there.  In  the 
thickest  of  that  day's  fighting  he  left  his 
motor-car  and  ran  to  a  wood  where  a 
brigade  was  giving  ground.  As  he  rushed 
in,  a  wounded  private  staggered  back  into 
his  arms.  French  laid  him  gently  down  and 
went  on  talking  to  his  men,  encouraging 
them,  rallying  them,  until  they  held.  He 


SPLEXDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  189 

gathered  up  a  part  of  the  broken  First 
Division  and  threw  it  at  the  flank  of  a 
German  attack  which  was  proceeding  on 
the  reckless  theory  that  the  English  were 
totally  beaten.  The  Germans  broke  ;  the 
British  re-took  Gheluvelt  on  the  original 
line.  With  this  start,  and  partly  by  move 
after  move  of  the  closest  and  yet  most 
daring  strategy,  but  partly  by  the  spirit 
of  an  army  which  begins  to  see  victory, 
French  snatched  back  the  positions  lost 
on  that  four-mile  retirement  and  rested 
on  the  original  line. 

The  British  had  merely  held — technically 
— really,  they  had  won  the  climacteric 
action  in  that  long  battle  which  must 
determine  the  future  course  of  this  war. 
The  cost  of  it  was  no  less  than  the  cost 
of  other  famous  victories.  One  Division 
landed  on  the  Belgian  coast  at  full  strength 
of  19,000.  It  had  only  3,500  effectives 
when  this  campaign  was  done.  One  regi- 
ment went  into  that  campaign  1,100  strong. 
It  came  out  but  73.  And  most  of  the 
lost  thousand  went  down  that  day  before 
Ypres.  Another  regiment  took  1,350  men 
to  the  western  front.  It  had  fewer  than 


190    MEN,    WOMEN    AND    WAR 

300  after  the  battle  of  Ypres.  Most  of 
them,  too,  fell  in  this  action  of  the  31st 
of  October.  A  famous  cavalry  brigade 
went  into  action  4,500  strong.  It  came 
out  decimated  ;  for  it  had  been  holding 
off,  alone,  a  whole  army  corps  of  41,000  ! 

In  old  wars  a  battle  lasted  a  day  or  two  ; 
victory  came  in  an  hour,  and  it  was  all 
over  but  the  pursuit ;  the  courier  went 
forward  to  the  capital ;  there  was  illum- 
ination and  bell-ringing.  In  this  new  war 
no  one,  not  even  the  commander,  may 
know  the  decisive  moment ;  the  day  of 
real  victory  blends  into  days  where  the 
fight  still  goes  on  ;  to  none  of  these  modern 
battles  is  there  as  yet  an  end.  The  31st 
of  October  was  the  decisive  point  of  the 
action  before  Ypres,  but  no  one  knew  it 
then.  The  attacks  and  counter-attacks, 
the  digging  in,  went  on.  French  troops 
began  arriving  in  force  to  strengthen  and 
make  sure  the  line. 

Nevertheless,  the  Germans  had  one  more 
great  assault  on  their  programme.  Ypres  is 
the  old  historic  capital  of  French  Flanders  ; 
and  the  British  observers  noted  a  curious 
fact  about  the  operations  against  Ypres. 


SPLENDID  STORY  OF  YPRES  191 

However  heavy  the  German  bombardment, 
the  famous  old  Cloth  Hall,  the  most 
beautiful  building  of  its  kind  in  Flanders, 
went  unscathed  by  shells.  It  was  saved, 
we  know  now,  for  a  particular  purpose. 
Kaiser  Wilhelm  himself  was  moving  for- 
ward with  a  special  force  to  a  special 
assault  which  should  finally  and  definitely 
break  the  Allied  line  at  Ypres.  To  do 
this  was  to  clear  Flanders  of  the  Allies  ; 
and  then,  as  by  custom  he  might,  he 
intended  to  annex  Belgium  in  the  Cloth 
Hall  of  Ypres.  He  came  with  his  own 
Prussian  Guard  ;  it  was  that  Guard  which, 
on  the  15th,  led  another  terrible  massed 
attack.  It  was  no  less  vigorous  than  the 
attack  of  the  31st ;  but  the  British, 
reinforced  now  by  the  French,  met  it 
better.  Again  the  dense  masses  poured  in ; 
again  the  very  officers  fired  until  their 
rifles  grew  too  hot  to  hold.  When,  that 
night,  the  strength  of  the  German  attack 
was  spent,  the  better  part  of  the  Prussian 
Guard  lay  dead  in  a  wood — lay,  at  some 
places,  in  ranks  eight  deep.  The  second 
and  lesser  climax  was  past.  A  fortnight 
more,  and  the  line  from  La  Bassee  to  the 


192    MEN,    WOMEN   AND    WAR 

sea  had  been  locked  as  thoroughly  as  the 
line  from  Switzerland  to  La  Bassee.  It 
had  cost  England  50,000  men  out  of  120,000 
engaged — a  proportion  of  loss  greater  than 
any  previous  war  ever  knew.  It  had 
cost  the  French  and  Belgians  70,000. 
It  probably  cost  the  Germans  375,000. 
That  is  a  half-million  in  all.  The  American 
Civil  War  has  been  called  the  most  terrible 
in  modern  history.  In  this  one  long  battle 
Europe  lost  as  many  men  as  the  North 
lost  in  the  whole  Civil  War. 

It  happened  so  close  to  the  capital  of 
Great  Britain  that  officers  in  a  hurry  are 
now  making  the  trip  from  London  to 
Headquarters  in  four  hours.  It  happened 
in  an  age  when  intelligence  travels  by 
lightning.  It  happened  in  a  day  of  that 
age  when  every  mind  of  the  Western 
world  was  awaiting  hungrily  for  news. 
Yet  the  real  news — the  news  that  the  battle 
of  Ypres  was  decisive,  on  the  western 
front,  that  it  may  rank  with  Waterloo 
and  Blenheim  for  glory  and  for  effect- 
that  news  is  coming  out  only  now,  months 
after  the  event.  In  such  strange  times 
do  we  live  1 


A     000040414     5 


